The power of prayer...

Prayer seems quite out of place in the modern world but when I was a boy in the fifties, daily prayer was part of the ritual of everyday life. It was quite common for people to request of others that they pray for special intentions. Special intentions could include praying that a person might recover from an illness or major operation or that a family might maintain its strength in the face of bereavement.

Interesting studies

If these thoughts make you question my connectedness with reality or the possibility that I am living on another planet, it might surprise you to learn that medical researchers are actively researching the power of prayer. Some of their findings make interesting reading.

In 1982 a landmark study was conducted over a ten-month period in San Francisco General Hospital. The study focussed on the effects of prayer on a group of 393 patients in the hospital’s coronary care unit. I have called this study a landmark study because it was one of the first of its kind and it followed the strict scientific formula of a double blind, randomised controlled trial. This scientific method means that people were assigned to the study group or control group at random and neither the people nor their attending doctors or the researchers knew who was being prayed for. Christians of several denominations performed the prayers. The study focussed on the impact of the prayers of intercessors and not the power of praying for oneself. The intercessors were given the first name, diagnosis and general condition of the person they were praying for and were given periodic updates on the person’s progress. Prayer took place on a daily basis until the person was discharged from hospital. I emphasise again that the people in the coronary care unit did not know if they were being prayed for or not and the researchers gathering the data were equally blind on this point.

Coronary care

A scoring system was devised to score the clinical course for each person as being good, intermediate or bad. A good outcome was more frequent in those that were prayed for than those that were not prayed for. Prayer had no effect on the length of stay in the coronary care unit or the overall stay in the hospital. However, cardiac arrest, heart failure, pneumonia, intubation and ventilation were less frequent in the "prayed for" group. The researchers focussed on 26 new problems, diagnoses or therapeutic events that occurred after entry into the trial and again found that the "prayed for" group fared better. It is also worth noting that there were no outcomes where the control group or "non-prayed for" scored higher.

If that study has you scratching your head in wonder you might be equally mesmerised by a more recent study published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine in 1999. This study took place in Seoul, South Korea and focussed on a group of 199 women who were undergoing in-vitro treatment for infertility. The study group was again randomised and the obstetricians and researchers were unaware of who was being prayed for or not being prayed for. Just like the previous study, Christian prayer groups performed intercessory prayers on behalf of the women. These groups were located in Australia, Canada and the USA. Each of the prayer groups was given a photograph of the woman they were praying for. The researchers found that that the "prayed for" group achieved a doubling of their pregnancy rate when compared with the control group. It is worth noting that the women were chosen for the study on the basis of age and fertility difficulties.

A third study recently reported in the American Heart Journal studied the effect of intercessory prayer on a group of 150 patients undergoing angioplasty with stent insertion. Angioplasty is a procedure in which a special balloon catheter is guided into a partially blocked coronary artery and the stent is a small metal tube that is left in the artery to keep the artery propped open once the catheter has been removed. The people under study were randomly assigned to receive intercessory prayer or one of a number of complementary therapies.

More trials needed

All of the complementary therapies were performed at the person’s bedside at least one hour before the procedure whereas the intercessory prayer was performed off site. Those in the "prayed for" group experienced fewer complications than any of the other people including those receiving the complementary therapies. The researchers were careful not to draw too many conclusions from their study but found the data to be sufficiently intriguing to warrant embarking on further trials.

Other studies on the impact of intercessory prayer have had mixed results. One study looked at the effects of intercessory prayer on the well being of people on renal dialysis and concluded that no beneficial effect occurred. An American pilot investigation looked at the effect of intercessory prayer in the treatment of alcohol abuse and again found there was no benefit. However, another study again demonstrated the positive effects of intercessory prayer for people in coronary care units.

What are we to make of all of this? The examples I have given are intriguing but do not prove definitively that the various positive outcomes are directly attributable to the power of prayer. There could have been other variables at work that produced some of these positive outcomes. It is important to maintain a sceptical attitude when interpreting such studies but it is difficult to remain disinterested and unimpressed by the results. At a minimum these studies warrant further investigation into the power of prayer. It is an intriguing and legitimate area for medical enquiry.

I shall remain sceptical but open to the possibility that there just might be something in this. But I will keep in my mind the words of a friend who said that he would truly believe in the power of prayer when he sees a man with one leg coming back from Lourdes with two. Or is that setting the bar for burden of proof too high?