Prayer's Power to Heal Strangers Is Examined

[roger]

States the title to this Washington Post article.

The lead paragraph states:

Praying for sick strangers does not improve their prospects of recovering, according to a large, carefully designed study that casts doubt on the widely held belief that being prayed for can help a person heal.

I thought the article was well done. The reporters talked to quite a few people, in both the positive and negative camps. However, what they didn't do is try to give the impression that both sides are equal, or deserve equal weight, as do so many media stories that paint a biased picture under the rubric of "fairness".

For example, they quote several people who make solid criticisms of flaws in previous trials that claimed positive results. Then, on the prayer side, they quote somebody saying

Prayer can be and is helpful ..But to think that you can research it is inconceivable to me. Prayer is presumably a way of addressing God, and there's no way to scientifically test God. God is not subject to scientific research.

Well, you can test emperical claims, and the claim that prayer heals is emperical. Overruled.

I do realize that people could argue that they only quoted strong arguments against prayer, and then only printed goofy responses for prayer. But, I do feel it is a good example of scientific journalism, given the small amount of space they had available for the article.

 

[Anders W. Bonde]

Nonetheless, the article does not really question the willingness to waste more dollars on futile studies to investigate the therapeutic effect of intercessory (sp?) prayer. Some religious researches will continue to mine for any data that fits their pre-conceived notions irrespective of how many failed studies litter their path, simply by putting forth the excuse "more research is required" for their cognitive dissonance.




Eventually they might win the IgNoble Prize...