• St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City was the venue for one of the latest and most controversial prayer studies. 
  • In this study, 990 patients in the coronary care unit were randomly assigned to either a treatment or a control group. Both groups received the standard medical treatment for their cardiac problems. 
    • Names of patients in the experimental group were given to 15 different teams of intercessors, who agreed to pray for 28 consecutive days for no complications and a rapid recovery from the cardiac problems that had landed the patients in the intensive care unit.
    • Questions of ethics aside (neither the patients nor their health care providers knew about the existence of the study), analysis of the study indicated a mean score of 6.35 for the prayed-for patients and 7.13 for the control-group patients, a difference that was statistically significant. Statistical significance in this case means that the odds of this difference occurring by chance alone would be 25 to 1. Lower mean scores correlated with fewer complications postoperatively. Moreover, the physician who tallied the findings did not know what patients were in the control or experimental groups.
    • The St. Luke’s prayer study did not go unnoticed by the medical community. Letters to the editor came pouring in, and by eight months after the initial article appeared, 15 were published. The majority took issue with the lack of informed consent and some rather serious flaws related to study design and methodology.
          
• Randolph C. Byrd, a Christian physician at San Francisco General Hospital, conducted an earlier study of a similar nature on intercessory prayer, which served as a model for the St. Luke’s study.
  • Results were published in the July 1988 issue of the Southern Medical Journal. According to the Byrd study, prayed-for coronary intensive care patients in an experimental group fared better than control-group patients in 20 out of 26 categories; dependent variables, assessed and showing statistically significant differences, included incidence of pneumonia and cardiac arrest, development of congestive heart failure, need for intubation, and diuretic and antibiotic therapy.
  • Based on this one study, Byrd concluded that God answers prayer.
    • Nevertheless, silence rather than controversy followed this study’s publication, according to Byrd. Unlike the St. Luke’s study, the ethical issue of informed consent was addressed in the study with 393 patients who agreed to participate in either the experimental or control group, and were then assigned at random in a similarly blinded fashion.
    • Prayer was made by “born-again” Christian intercessors from Protestant and Catholic churches to the Judeo-Christian God for a rapid recovery rate and prevention of complications and death.

Why should prayer research pose problems? If science is indeed lending support for the hypothesis that prayed-for people get well quicker and have less complications following major surgery, why should questions be raised that might challenge this hypothesis?

The Question of Manipulation: A troubling question remains with respect to the use of intercessory prayer in a randomized trial. Is it, in fact, real prayer? Is it prayer at all?

In an essay entitled “The Efficacy of Prayer,” C. S. Lewis raised this question and even suggested that an experiment could be conducted that is remarkably similar to those being conducted today. “I have heard it suggested,” wrote Lewis, “that a team of people — the more the better — should agree to pray as hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B. Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths. And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of irrelevant factors.”

Lewis had an excellent grasp of statistical analysis. He had an even better grasp of the underlying issues. His analysis was that no “real prayer” could possibly go on under such conditions. People could not, he reasoned, pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end they had in view was their recovery. The actual motive of the experiment he envisioned was not to ensure the recovery of all patients but to see what might happen. Does prayer work? So, he concluded, the “real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance” and “whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying.” The experiment, he concluded, “demands an impossibility.”

Download full report, The Problem with Prayer Research by Sharon Fish Mooney