| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
What a tremendous stir-up your excellent article on prayer has made in England and America! –Charles Darwin to Francis Galton, –November 8th, 1872 (1)
WELL OVER A CENTURY AGO, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and the founder of modern biostatistics, called for a prospective, controlled study of whether those for whom prayers were offered would heal faster than those unaided by distant appeals to the deity (2)
. Writing in the Fortnightly Review of August 1, 1872, Galton proposed the comparison of two groups of traumatically injured patients, "the one consisting of markedly religious, piously-befriended individuals, the other of those who were remarkably cold-hearted and neglected." He believed that an "honest comparison of their respective periods of treatment and the results would manifest a distinct proof of the efficacy of prayer." (2)
This spring, 134 years later, his call was answered in a definitive, double blind study published in the American Heart Journal, fetchingly named "The Study of Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP)" (3)
. Both its scope and cost were greater than the trial proposed in 1872.
STEP AND CABG
Herbert Benson of Harvard and a brigade of faithful collaborators assigned three Christian prayer groups to pray for 1800 patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery in six medical centers throughout the United States. Funded mainly by the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research at the religion–science interface, the $2.4 million study was touted as ‘the most intense investigation ever undertaken of whether prayer can help to heal illness." (4)
It found that patients undergoing CABG surgery did no better when prayed for by strangers at a distance to them (intercessory prayer) than those who received no prayers. But 59% of those patients who were told they were definitely being prayed for developed complications, compared with 52% of those who had been told it was just a possibility, a statistically significant, if theologically disappointing, result. Benson et al. came to the objective conclusion that "Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications." (3)
American advocates of intercessory prayer immediately disputed the work. "‘God factor’ defended; Prayer study flawed" headlined the Worcester Telegram and Gazette. Brother Dennis Anthony Wyrzykowski told the newspaper that "The study was not a ploy to make God look bad," he said. "Dr. Benson is interested in the God factor. He’s not out to disprove anything. We were disappointed. I was sure it would show that prayer works ..." (5)
. "Area residents challenging prayer study" headlined the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Rev. Robert Friend, of All Saints Episcopal Church, argued "That’s not the way prayer works. When we pray we are aligning ourselves the best we can with God’s will for us. I think God’s will for us is that we be whole and healthy." All Saints will continue its weekly prayer service for healing (6)
.
Newspapers in other corners of the earth drew different conclusions: "Healing power of prayer debunked," cried the Gazette of Montreal, while Le Monde warned from Paris that "La prière serait dangereuse pour la santé" [Prayer is dangerous to your health]. Britain’s The Guardian called attention to the most unexpected result of the STEP study: "If you want to get better–don’t say a little prayer." The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman wrote "If a religious person offers to pray for you next time you fall ill, you may wish politely to ask them not to bother. The largest scientific study into the health effects of prayer seems to suggest it may make matters worse" (7)
.
PRAYERS AND ROYALS
The Guardian didn’t need Benson’s study to draw its conclusions. Indeed, the STEP trial had been scooped by an older, irrefutable, and far less expensive analysis: Galton’s essay of 1872. Galton suggested that in place of any prospective study of intercessory prayer in traumatic injury, a more rigorous test of the effect of prayer would require life or death as an end-point. He proposed an inquiry "into the longevity of persons whose lives are prayed for; also that of the praying classes generally; and in both those cases we can easily obtain statistical facts." He noted that, from time immemorial, public prayer each Sunday had been offered from The Book of Common Prayer for the long life of the Royal Family of England—"Grant him/her in health long to live." He asked, "Now, as a simple matter of fact, has this prayer any efficacy?" Culling data from records of over 6500 biographies assembled by a colleague, Galton found that intercessory prayer offered on behalf of those who knew they were prayed for was bad for one’s health (2)
.
It turned out that members of royal houses had a mean life expectancy of 64.0 years, significantly less than that of other aristocrats (67.3 yrs) or of other gentry (70.2 yrs). Since the royals knew they were being prayed for—we might say that each Sunday they were on the same page as their subjects—they were as much at risk for a worse outcome from prayer as were Dr. Benson’s CABG patients. While Benson et al. downplayed the possible side effects of prayer as a possible chance finding, Galton had reached a similar conclusion from a neater end point.
Worse yet! The life expectancy of eminent clergymen (66.4) was no higher than that of their peers among lawyers (66.5) or medical men (67.0) and Galton concluded, in keeping with the results of the STEP trial, that prayers "of the clergy for protection against the perils and dangers of the night, for protection during the day, and for recovery from sickness, appear to be futile in result" (2)
.
STEP AND NCCAM
In an editorial that accompanied the STEP trial, William Krucoff and colleagues at Duke sounded concern over the higher incidence of complications in the group that knew it was being prayed for. They asked: "If the results had shown benefit rather than harm, would we have read the investigators’ conclusion that this effect ‘may have been a chance finding’, with absolutely no other comments, insight, or even speculation?" (8)
Supported by a foundation committed the "God factor" at work in health and disease, Benson et al. must have been taken aback by the harmful consequences of intercessory prayer. Perhaps that is why it took almost five years to analyze data obtained on patients enrolled in the trial from January 1998 to November 2000! (9)
Undaunted, Dr. Charles Bethea, one of STEP’s co-authors insisted that "One conclusion from this is that the role of awareness of prayer should be studied further." (4)
While the final STEP publication was impartial in its presentation and low-keyed in interpretation, it aroused the anger of believers and skeptics alike. The credulous contended that STEP was flawed, that it represented bad medical care and trivialized religion (7)
. Skeptics argued against the study, convinced that there is no place in the realm of science for supernatural intervention (10)
.
Now, it is certainly within the prerogative of objective clinicians to engage in statistical analyses of long-range prayer for others, especially when a foundation devoted to such notions picks up the tab. On the other hand, not only skeptics will wonder why the National Institutes of Health would encourage or support inquiries into the supernatural. Newspaper accounts of the STEP trial carried the remarkable news that our government has spent more than $2.3 million of public money on prayer research since 2000 (4)
. Some of these studies overlap the published results of Galton and Benson et al., including, for example, "Distant Healing Efforts for AIDS by Nurses and ‘Healers’ " (Elisabeth F. Targ, PI California Pacific Medical Center, 1-R01-AT-485-1), a three year grant totaling approx $663,000 and "Efficacy of Distant Healing in Glioblastoma Treatment" (idem, PI, 1-R01-AT-644-1), a four-year grant totaling approx $823,000. Results of these studies have not yet been made public, but as Martin Gardner has reported, the principal investigator on these grants has long been a fan of distant healing (11)
. In April of 2000, Targ reported that:
"Of more than 135 studies of distant healing on biological organisms...about two-thirds reported significant results. One fascinating study...concerned remote healing of tumors on mice. The study showed that the healers who were farthest from the mice had the greatest influence in shrinking the tumors!" (11)
To be fair, when conducting controlled trials, Dr. Targ has been as professional and objective as Dr. Benson and his colleagues in their STEP study. Reporting on an $800,000 trial funded by the Department of Defense (Grant No. 17-96-1-6260) of Complementary and Alternative Methodologies (CAM) in breast cancer, in "The efficacy of a mind-body-spirit group for women with breast cancer" she concluded that "The study found equivalence on most psychosocial outcomes between the two interventions" (CAM vs. control) (12)
. And that’s not even at a distance!
This year, the chances of being funded on any given grant application to the NIH may fall well below 10% (13)
. It is in this context that one questions whether the NIH, and especially the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has any business encouraging further grant applications and/or research into prayer. Those of us who do experimental biology are generally uninterested in enlarging the norms of our realm into the spiritual, artistic, or ethical life of our time. But the believers in "noetic," spiritual, or supernatural explanations for the vast territory of the unknown in science seem to have no such qualms. They have persuaded a credulous citizenry that there is spiritual gold to be mined by applying the methods of science to the study of religious practice. By confusing credulity with piety, they’ve also cleared the way to belief in "intelligent design." Such notions discredit both rigorous science and true belief.
NCCAM is undeterred. Catherine Stoney, Ph.D., of its Division of Extramural Research and Training insists that: "There is already some preliminary evidence for a connection between prayer and related practices and health outcomes. For example, we’ve seen some evidence that religious affiliation and religious practices are associated with health and mortality—in other words, with better health and longer life." (14)
She is unlikely to have consulted Galton’s statistics in The Fortnightly Review.
Galton, who shared Erasmus Darwin as a grandfather with Charles Darwin (all three were Fellows of the Royal Society) was far more modest in his peroration:
Neither does anything I have said profess to throw light on the question of how far it is possible for man to commune in his heart with God ... and it is equally certain that similar benefits are not excluded from those who on conscientious grounds are skeptical as to the reality of a power of communion ... They know that they are descended from an endless past, that they have a brotherhood with all that is, and have each his own share of responsibility in the parentage of an endless future. The effort to familiarize the imagination with this great idea has much in common with the effort of communing with a God, and its reaction on the mind of the thinker is in many important respects the same. It may not equally rejoice the heart, but it is quite as powerful in ennobling the resolves, and it is found to give serenity during life and in the shadow of approaching death (2)
.
|
REFERENCES
Related Articles
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
