Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [27]
After ten months, Byrd’s study seemed to indicate a medical impossibility: those who received prayer had many fewer hospital stays and much less need of medical attention, including ventilatory assistance, antibiotics, and diuretics.10
The study rocked the materialists back on their heels, and emboldened other researchers to assess whether there exists some nonmaterial force that responds to prayer and heals. One study found that prayer physically helped people with advanced AIDS.11 Another large study replicated the Byrd findings and found that prayer helps one recover from heart attacks and heart disease.12 There was good news for would-be parents: in a controversial study, researchers in South Korea found that women who were trying to become pregnant through in vitro fertilization were twice as likely to conceive if they received prayer than if they did not.13 Monkeys, too, have much to celebrate: those who received prayer healed more quickly from wounds than those who received no prayer.14 And, finally, in a study destined for the annals of the weird, Israeli doctors tested retroactive prayer. They asked intercessors to pray for half of nearly 3,400 people who suffered bloodstream infection in the hospital in the early 1990s. But the intercessors began praying in 2000—six to ten years after the patients developed the infection. The group receiving retroactive prayer had lower mortality rates, shorter hospital stays, and shorter periods of fever.15
But for every study suggesting that prayer heals a person’s body, there is another one showing that prayer has no effect—or worse, that you don’t want prayer, no how, no way, get that intercessor away from me. Does prayer help people with heart problems in a coronary care unit? Researchers at the Mayo Clinic found no effect.16 Does it benefit people who needed to clear their arteries using angioplasty? Not according to researchers at Duke and other medical centers.17 In other studies, prayer and “distant healing” did not seem to affect the course of HIV,18 did not alleviate pain for those suffering from rheumatoid arthritis,19 and did not ease the plight of those on kidney dialysis machines.20 People with skin warts will get no comfort here: researchers found that people who received prayer saw the number of warts actually increase slightly, compared with those who received no prayer.21 In the most famous study, conducted by Harvard researcher Herbert Benson and his colleagues, prayer backfired, at least for those who knew it was coming.22
I looked a little closer at this study, which involved 1,802 patients undergoing cardiac bypass surgery. They were split into three groups. Members of one group received intercessory prayer for fourteen days, beginning the night before the operation, but they did not know it. Members of another group were told they would receive prayer, and they did. The third group did not receive prayer. The result left advocates of prayer sputtering and critics of prayer chortling. Patients who received prayer and did not know it, and those who received no prayer fared about the same.The patients who did worst—who had the most complications—were those who received prayer and knew it.
I have heard many explanations for this surprising result, including the complaint that these prayer studies do not reflect the way people actually pray. How many of us pray for a complete stranger by reading from a script? Most of us pray urgently, passionately, for a person we know and love. It is an intimate act. This critique comforts some people as far as the results of studies showing that prayer has no effect. But what about the Benson study showing prayer is bad for your health?
One explanation, Anne Harrington told me, is the potential fear that arises when you are about to undergo bypass surgery and the doctor informs you that a trained healer is assigned to pray for you.
“One reaction is, ‘Oh my goodness, they’re praying for me, I must be really sick.Why am I chosen? This must be bad news,’ ” Harrington hypothesized.