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Scientific Studies

2006 NY Times article on 9-year, 1,800-patient study led by Dr. Herbert Benson, director of Boston’s “Mind/Body Medical Institute”.

Method:

The researchers asked the members of three congregations — St. Paul’s Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City — to deliver the prayers, using the patients’ first names and the first initials of their last names.

The congregations were told that they could pray in their own ways, but they were instructed to include the phrase, “for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.”

Analyzing complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers found no differences between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.

Outcomes:

a significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain. The authors left open the possibility that this was a chance finding. But they said that being aware of the strangers’ prayers also may have caused some of the patients a kind of performance anxiety.

“It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?” Dr. Bethea said.

The study also found that more patients in the uninformed prayer group — 18 percent — suffered major complications, like heart attack or stroke, compared with 13 percent in the group that did not receive prayers. In their report, the researchers suggested that this finding might also be a result of chance.

Comments:

the study could not overcome perhaps the largest obstacle to prayer study: the unknown amount of prayer each person received from friends, families, and congregations around the world who pray daily for the sick and dying.

This study differs from the “successful” studies primarily in who did the praying. “Successful” studies gathered thus far were conducted using born-again Christians. This study was conducted using “interfaith” people and Catholics.