Re: prayer and healing

I find it difficult to take *Leibovici*'s paper seriously. I think it was
tongue in cheek, and published to provoke discussion, and never intended to
be taken seriously.

The problem is that it would be so easy to generate a positive result by
repeating the experiment many times, given the conditions. If you think
about it, the study was on retro-active prayer 4-10 years after the case
outcomes were observed. All that was needed to set up an experiment was a
random number generator (to randomly divide the patients into two groups), a
toss of a coin (to decide which group was the intervention group), and one
person willing to say a quick prayer for the list of names supplied.

It would be extremely easy to set up this experiment 25 times & then one
would be expected to get a p=0.04 significance result just on random
numbers. Since the patient outcomes were already known, you could just
re-run the random number generator till it gave the desired outcome and then
ship off the list of names to the designated person to pray for the
subjects.

Contrast this with the difficulty and cost of setting up 25 live trials on
patients that were in the middle of a medical crisis. It takes a fraction
of a second to run a random number generator on 3393 patients, but a long
time to conduct a live study.

I'm not saying this is how the result was obtained, but there is nothing in
the description that would allow policing of such a method.

Another difficulty with the experiment arises if you place yourself in the
situation where you were asked to be the person who prayed for healing. You
are told it is a study, with Groups A and B and you have the names of the
Group A to pray for and told not to pray for Group B. Would you honestly
pray for one group and not the other? So you don't have the names of the
people in Group B? If you prayed "Lord, please heal all those in Group B",
how could one distinguish whether that was less likely to succeed than
praying for them by name?

So, however it was carried out, I think it's nothing more than a provocative
spoof.

Iain

On 4/4/06, Freeman, Louise Margaret <lfreeman@mbc.edu> wrote:
>
>
> __> Experiments like the one Jack points us happen frequently; they are
>
> > notoriously difficult to design and carry out; even more difficult to
> > analyze.
> >
> > Burgy
>
> I spoke on this topic recently for an honors colloquium (the full lecture
> was on investigating the supernatural with the tools of science) and came
> across a very interesting set of studies on retroactive accessory prayer. I
> decided not to address these particular studies in my lecture... the
> real-time prayer studies were more than enough... but the results were
> certainly fascinating. Apparently prayer works even 4-10 years after the
> actual medical crisis. Perfectly sensible for a God not limited by time or
> space, right?
>
> http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/323/7327/1450?view=full&pmid=11751349
>
> * http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/327/7429/1465*<http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=300811>
>
> http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=535973
>
> However, I think these studies must be reinterpreted in light of the
> recently published results. Perhaps the improved outcome is an artifact of
> the subjects *not knowing* they were going to be prayed for 10 years later.
>
>
>

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After the game, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.
- Italian Proverb
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