No benefit of prayer found after surgery

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No benefit of prayer found after surgery

Some question science of heart patient study

By Rob Stein, Associated Press | March 31, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Praying for other people to recover from an illness is

ineffective, according to the largest, best-designed study to try to examine

the power of prayer to heal strangers at a distance.

The study of more than 1,800 heart bypass surgery patients found that those

who had other people praying for them had as many complications as those who

did not. In fact, one group of patients who knew they were the subject of

prayers fared worse.

The long-awaited results, the latest in a series of studies that have failed

to find any benefit from ''distant " or ''intercessory " prayer, came as a

blow to the hopes of some that scientific research would validate the

popular notion that people can influence the health of people even if they

don't know someone is praying for them.

The researchers cautioned that the study was not designed to test the

existence of God or the benefit of other types of prayer, such as praying

for oneself or at bedsides of friends or relatives. They also did not rule

out that other types of distant prayer may be effective for other types of

patients.

''No one single study is ever going to provide an answer, " said Jeffery

Dusek of Harvard Medical School, who helped lead the study being published

in the April 4 issue of the American Heart Journal.

While many studies have suggested that praying for oneself may reduce

stress, research into praying for others who may not even know they are the

subject of prayers has been much more controversial. Several studies that

claimed to show a benefit have been criticized as deeply flawed. And several

of the most recent findings have found no benefit.

The new $2.4 million study, funded primarily by the Templeton

Foundation, was designed to overcome some of those shortcomings. Dusek and

his colleagues divided 1,802 bypass patients at six hospitals into three

groups. Two groups were uncertain whether they would be the subject of

prayers. The third was told they would be prayed for.

The researchers recruited two Catholic groups and one Protestant group to

pray ''for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no

complications " for 14 days for each patient, beginning the night before the

surgery, using the patient's first name and the first initial of the last

name.

Over the next month, patients in the two groups that were uncertain whether

they were the subject of prayers fared virtually the same, with about 52

percent experiencing complications regardless of whether they were the

subject of prayers.

Surprisingly, however, 59 percent of the patients who knew they were the

targets of prayer experienced complications.

Because the most common complication was an irregular heartbeat, the

researchers speculated that knowing they were chosen to receive prayers may

have put them under increased stress.

''Did the patients think, 'I am so sick they had to call in the prayer

team?' " said Bethea of the Integris Heart Hospital at Baptist

Medical Center in Oklahoma City, who helped conduct the study