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Faith healing experiment.

Cainkane1 said:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/prayer_pr.html

I was surfing the net and I put Faith healing is bogus and this what what turned up. Does anyone in here know anything about this experiment? It sounds like total woo woo crap to me.
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Elisabeth Targ is the late widow of Russel Targ, of Puthoff & Targ fame. Martin Gardner has followed all their careers over the years.

Regarding Elisabeth's series of distant healing experiments, Gardner has written an editorial in the Skeptical Inquirer: [Distant Healing and Elisabeth Targ]

I haven't been able to locate published copies of these experiments. The wired article does not provide references.
 
I can't comment on the substance, but the writing in the OP's link is horrible. You have to read halfway to the end before the studies are actually analyzed in any depth.
 
Cainkane1 said:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/prayer_pr.html

I was surfing the net and I put Faith healing is bogus and this what what turned up. Does anyone in here know anything about this experiment? It sounds like total woo woo crap to me.
Click to expand...
As your linked article reports:


  • the study originally showed no effect, so
  • the experimenters un-blinded the study,
  • data mined it for something, anything, that would show prayer was a benefit,
  • found something,
  • changed the study to make it appear they had been looking for those things all along,
  • re-blinded it, then published.
So the study was fraudulent, and certainly did not show that prayer works.
 
These bogus "intercessory prayer" studies typically come from the same small group of confused researchers or are funded by my hero and yours, The Templeton Foundation. You don't have to read far into any of them before you discover crippled reasoning (usually of the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" variety) and/or some major methodological flaw (like, say, no control group).

I highly recommend Richard Sloan's excellent book, Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine.
 
Cainkane1 said:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/prayer_pr.html

I was surfing the net and I put Faith healing is bogus and this what what turned up. Does anyone in here know anything about this experiment? It sounds like total woo woo crap to me.
Click to expand...

As RichardR already pointed out, the article says the experiment is crap and it was reported fraudulently. Were you looking for something else?

Here is the research article.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=9866433

Linda
 
Brian-M said:
20 patients hardly constitutes a decent sample size. A more recent study with 1802 patients showed no benefit from prayer.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0403/p13s02-lire.html
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Yep. And with a sample size that big (1,802 patients), we have an extremely sensitive design statistically speaking, which sometimes takes us into Type I error (false positive) land. So that's really saying something that there wasn't even a significant effect!

Another big problem with research focusing on the effects of prayer is the unwarranted conclusions that addlepated researchers draw from mere null hypothesis testing. Even in studies where they do get a statistically significant effect every now and then by rejecting a null hypothesis, which is essentially saying, "hey, the answer isn't zero!", they go on theoretical rampages in the "discussion" sections and try to slip in all sorts of non sequiturs.
 
Iconoclast08 said:
Yep. And with a sample size that big (1,802 patients), we have an extremely sensitive design statistically speaking, which sometimes takes us into Type I error (false positive) land. So that's really saying something that there wasn't even a significant effect!
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There was one significant effect... but a negative one. Those in the group who knew[/w] they were being prayed for had more medical complications.
 
Brian-M said:
There was one significant effect... but a negative one. Those in the group who knew[/w] they were being prayed for had more medical complications.
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Here's where they pull the old switcheroo. If the study shows any effect at all, even if they have to corkscrew the data to death, it's PROOF! If it's negative, there was something wrong with the study.
 
TiaH said:
Here's where they pull the old switcheroo. If the study shows any effect at all, even if they have to corkscrew the data to death, it's PROOF! If it's negative, there was something wrong with the study.
Click to expand...

Even though those who didn't know they were being prayed for showed no effect either way?

What the study is being criticized for is using standardized prayers, which is contrary to The Bible (apparently).
 
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