Harold G. Koenig, M.D.
Director, Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health
Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Associate Professor of Medicine
Duke University Medical Center
Adjunct Professor, Department of Psychiatry, School of Osteopathic Medicine, Campbell University, Buies Creek, North Carolina
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Study - Prayer Works
A 1995 study at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, examined how patients' own prayers affected their recovery from open-heart surgery.
This study found that patients who said they drew comfort and strength from religious faith, which presumably included prayer, were three times more likely to survive in the six months following surgery as “nonreligious” patients.
The power of prayer: Science proves it works, has positive physiological effects
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"Faith is the very embodiment of subjective."
Statement.... no proof.
"Your logic just disappeared so please do not abuse logical fallacies. It is not a false equivalence to point out that endlessly varying religions are due to the fact that faith is extremely subjective."
Statement.... no proof.
"If faith was reliable there would not be an endlessly different religions." - false equivalency
Still stands. If English language were a reliable form of communication, there would not be an endless different languages. (Using your standard of absurdity)
And studies have shown that intercessory prayer can have negative effects. One has to be careful when citing studies. The results are meaningless if we do not know the context. Prayer may help people to reasonable solve problems or even to change behavior but that appears to have more to do with how they are thinking than thinking itself More modern studies that try to do proper double or even triple blind studies do not find that prayer is effective for others:
Does Prayer Work?
In sum, no empirical, scientifically rigorous evidence has ever been brought forth proving the power of prayer. And just think about it: if praying produced the prayed-for outcomes, no prayed-for mothers would ever die of breast cancer, no prayed-for
teenagers would ever die on the operating table, no prayed-for dogs or cats would ever fail to return home, and tens of millions of praying people would never die from starvation resulting from a lack of rain. Three hundred million people have died from smallpox in the 20th century alone — clearly, all of their prayers, and their parents’ prayers, and their children’s prayers, and their spouses’ prayers, did not have the desired healing effect.
It is very easy to screw up a study, such as a study on prayer where personal intent makes a difference. As far as evidence goes prayer just does not cut it. People claim that it works, but that does not appear to be the case.
One more source, for intercessory prayer when one looks at numerous studies there is no benefit. Some cases showed a benefit, some did not. some showed worse results. One cannot cherry pick just the supporting studies in cases like this:
Various controlled studies have addressed the topic of the efficacy of prayer at least since
Francis Galton in 1872.
[13] Carefully monitored studies of prayer are relatively scarce with $5 million spent worldwide on such research each year.
[8] The largest study, from the 2006
STEP project, found no significant differences in patients recovering from heart surgery whether the patients were prayed for or not.
[14][7]
The third party studies reported either
null results, correlated results, or contradictory results in which beneficiaries of prayer had worsened health outcomes. For instance, a
meta-analysis of several studies related to distant intercessory healing published in the
Annals of Internal Medicine in 2000 looked at 2774 patients in 23 studies, and found that 13 studies showed statistically significant positive results, 9 studies showed no effect, and 1 study showed a negative result.
[15]
A 2003
levels of evidence review found evidence for the hypothesis that "Being prayed for improves physical recovery from acute illness".
[16] It concluded that although "a number of studies" have tested this hypothesis, "only three have sufficient rigor for review here" (Byrd 1988, Harris et al. 1999, and Sicher et al. 1998). In all three, "the strongest findings were for the variables that were evaluated most subjectively", raising concerns about the possible inadvertent unmasking of the outcomes' assessors. Other
meta-studies of the broader literature have been performed showing evidence only for no effect or a potentially small effect. For instance, a 2006 meta analysis on 14 studies concluded that there is "no discernible effect" while a 2007 systemic review of intercessory prayer reported inconclusive results, noting that 7 of 17 studies had "small, but significant, effect sizes" but the review noted that the three most methodologically rigorous studies failed to produce significant findings.
[17][18]
Efficacy of prayer - Wikipedia
Of course you can find a study or two that support prayers. In fact it is very easy to find studies that did not follow proper protocols that seem to strongly support prayer. But the better the study is the less effective prayer is. That should tell you something.
