CAN PRAYERS HEAL? - RESEARCH REPORTFROM NEWYORK TIMES

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Can Prayers Heal? Critics Say Studies Go Past Science #39;s ReachFrom New York

Times, October 10, 2004By BENEDICT CAREY

In 2001, two researchers and a Columbia University fertility expert published a

startling finding in a respected medical journal: women undergoing fertility

treatment who had been prayed for by Christian groups were twice as likely to

have a successful pregnancy as those who had not.

Three years later, after one of the researchers pleaded guilty to conspiracy in

an unrelated business fraud, Columbia is investigating the study and the

journal reportedly pulled the paper from its Web site.

No evidence of manipulation has yet surfaced, and the study's authors stand behind their data.

But the doubts about the study have added to the debate over a deeply

controversial area of research: whether prayer can heal illness.

Critics express outrage that the federal government, which has contributed $2.3

million in financing over the last four years for prayer research, would spend

taxpayer money to study something they say has nothing to do with science.

"Intercessory prayer presupposes some supernatural intervention that is by

definition beyond the reach of science," said Dr. Richard J. McNally, a

psychologist at Harvard. "It is just a nonstarter, in my opinion, a total waste

of time and money."

Prayer researchers, many themselves believers in prayer's healing powers, say

scientists do not need to know how a treatment or intervention works before

testing it.

Dr. Richard Nahin, a senior adviser at the National Center for Complementary and

Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, said in an

e-mail message that the studies were meant to answer practical questions, not

religious ones.

"We only recently understood how aspirin worked, and the mechanisms of action of

various antidepressants and general anesthetics remain under investigation," Dr.

Nahin wrote.

He said a recent government study found that 45 percent of adults prayed

specifically for health reasons, and suggested that many of them were poor

people with limited access to care.

"It is a public health imperative to understand if this prayer offers them any

benefit," Dr. Nahin wrote.

Some researchers also point out that praying for the relief of other people's

suffering is a deeply human response to disease.

The 'Placebo Effect'

Since 2000, at least 10 studies of intercessory prayer have been carried out by

researchers at institutions including the Mind/Body Medical Institute, a

nonprofit clinic near Boston run by a Harvard-trained cardiologist, as well as

Duke University and the University of Washington. Government financing of

intercessory prayer research began in the mid-1990's and has continued under

the Bush administration.

In one continuing study, financed by the National Institutes of Health and

called "Placebo Effect in Distant Healing of Wounds," doctors at California

Pacific Medical Center, a major hospital in San Francisco, inflict a tiny stab

wound on the abdomens of women receiving breast reconstruction surgery, with

their consent, and then determine whether the "focused intention" of a variety

of healers speeds the wound's healing.

Two large trials of the effects of prayer on coronary health are currently under

review at prominent medical journals.

Even those who defend prayer research concede that such studies are difficult.

For one thing, no one knows what constitutes a "dose": some studies have tested

a few prayers a day by individual healers, while others have had entire

congregations pray together. Some have involved evangelical Christians; others

have engaged rabbis, Buddhist and New Age healers, or some combination.

Another problem concerns the mechanism by which prayer might be supposed to

work. Some researchers contend that prayer's effects - if they exist - have

little to do with religion or the existence of God. Instead of divine

intervention, they propose things like "subtle energies,mind-to-mind

communication" or "extra dimensions of space-time" - concepts that many

scientists dismiss as nonsense. Others suggest that prayer may have a soothing

effect that works like a placebo for believers who know they are being prayed

for. Either way, even many churchgoers are skeptical that prayer can be

subjected to scientific scrutiny. For one thing, prayers vary in their purpose

and content: some give praise, others petition for strength, many ask only that

God's will be done. For another, not everyone sees God as one who does favors on

request.

"There's no way to put God to the test, and that's exactly what you're doing

when you design a study to see if God answers your prayers," said the Rev.

Raymond J. Lawrence Jr., director of pastoral care at New York-Presbyterian

Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. "This whole exercise cheapens

religion, and promotes an infantile theology that God is out there ready to

miraculously defy the laws of nature in answer to a prayer." Prayer and Heart

Disease

Proponents of prayer research often cite two large heart disease trials to

justify further study of prayer's healing potential.

In one study, Dr. Randolph Byrd, a San Francisco cardiologist, had groups of

born-again Christians pray for 192 of 393 patients being treated at the

coronary care unit of San Francisco General Hospital. In 1988, Dr. Byrd

reported in The Southern Medical Journal, a peer-reviewed publication of the

Southern Medical Association, that the patients who were prayed for did better

on several measures of health, including the need for drugs and breathing

assistance.

At the end of the paper, Dr. Byrd wrote, "I thank God for responding to the many

prayers made on behalf of the patients."

In the other study, of 990 heart disease patients, Dr. William S. Harris of St.

Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., and his colleagues reported in The

Archives of Internal Medicine in 1999 that the patients who were prayed for by

religious strangers did significantly better than the others on a measure of

coronary health that included more than 30 factors. Dr. Harris, who was one of

the authors of a paper arguing that Darwin's theory of evolution is

speculative, concluded that his study supported Dr. Byrd's.

In the experiments, the researchers did not know until the study was completed

which patients were being prayed for. But experts say the two studies suffer

from a similar weakness: the authors measured so many variables that some were

likely to come up positive by chance. In effect, statisticians say, this method

is like asking the same question over and over until you get the answer you

want.

"It's a weak measure," said Dr. Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral

medicine at Columbia who has been critical of prayer research. "You're

collecting 30 or 40 variables but can't even specify up front which ones" will

be affected.

Dr. Harris corrected for this problem, experts say, but he then found

significant differences between prayer and no-prayer groups only by using a

formula that he and his colleagues had devised, and that no one else had ever

validated. A swarm of letters to the journal challenged Dr. Harris's methods.

One correspondent, a Dutch doctor, jokingly claimed that he could account for

the results because he was clairvoyant. "I have subsequently used my telepathic

powers to influence the course of the experimental group," he wrote.

Still, some religious leaders and practitioners of alternative medicine argue

that because prayer is so common a response to illness, researchers have a

responsibility to investigate it. "We need to look at this with what I call

open-minded skepticism," said Dr. Marilyn Schlitz, the lead investigator of the

federally financed wound healing study and the director of research at the

Institute of Noetic Sciences, an alternative medicine research center near San

Francisco.

Questions About Data

It was a former associate of Dr. Schlitz's, Dr. Elisabeth Targ, who first helped

draw federal money into research on so-called distant healing. The daughter of

Russell Targ, a physicist who studied extrasensory perception for government

intelligence agencies in the 1970's, Dr. Targ made headlines with a 1998 study

suggesting that prayers from assorted religious healers and shamans could

protect AIDS patients from some complications related to the disease.

The findings, and Dr. Targ's reputation, helped win her two grants from the

complementary and alternative medicine center at the National Institutes of

Health - one for a larger study of distant healing among AIDS patients, another

to test the effect of prayers by outside healers on the longevity of people with

deadly brain tumors.

Both trials are continuing at the California Pacific Medical Center in San

Francisco, which has a complementary medicine wing, but Dr. Targ is no longer

running them. She herself died of brain cancer in 2002.

Shortly after Dr. Targ's death, her methods came under attack. An article in

Wired magazine charged that she and her co-authors had massaged their data on

AIDS to make the effects of prayer look better than they were.

Officials at California Pacific conducted an investigation of the study and

concluded that the data had not been manipulated. Dr. John Astin, who is

running the second AIDS study, said the biggest weakness of Dr. Targ's first

trial was that it was too small to be conclusive. But in a letter defending the

study, the hospital's director of research also acknowledged that he could not

tell for sure from the original medical records which patients had been prayed

for and which had not been.

"Each subject's name, age and date of birth were blinded with what appears to be

a black crayon," he wrote.

The quality of original data is also at the center of the controversy over the

2001 Columbia fertility study, which was reported by many newspapers including

The New York Times. Dr. Kwang Cha, a Korean fertility specialist visiting the

university, was the study's lead author. Daniel Wirth, a lawyer from California

who had conducted research on alternative healing, was his principal research

associate. In the spring of 1999, the two met at a Starbucks on the Upper West

Side to exchange data, according to Dr. Cha, who provided details of the

meeting through a colleague.

Dr. Cha had the pregnancy results with him, and Mr. Wirth had a roster of the

women he said had been prayed for. The two had never shared the information

before, and Dr. Cha was surprised enough by the results that he took them to a

former mentor, Dr. Rogerio Lobo of Columbia, to make sure the study was done

correctly.

In a recent interview, Dr. Lobo said that the study had come to him as a "fait

accompli" and that he had interrogated Dr. Cha to make sure his study methods

were sound. He decided they were and helped write the study.

"We had these results, we didn't believe them, we couldn't explain them, but we

decided to put them out there," Dr. Lobo said.

In May, Mr. Wirth pleaded guilty to conspiracy in connection with a $2 million

business fraud in Pennsylvania. He is awaiting sentencing.

Dr. Lobo said he had met Mr. Wirth but knew little about him or about his

contributions to the study. He acknowledged that the data could have been

manipulated, but said he did not know how.

"I didn't actually conduct the study, so I can't know for sure," Dr. Lobo said.

Mr. Wirth's lawyer, William Arbuckle, said his client was not available for comment.

'This Is No Routine Paper'

One study that many people believe could either bolster prayer research or

dampen interest in the topic has been completed, but has not yet been

published. Dr. Herbert Benson, the cardiologist who founded the Mind/Body

Medical Institute, began the trial in the late 1990's with $2.4 million from

the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research into spirituality. The

Mind/Body Institute, according to its Web site, is a "scientific and

educational organization dedicated to the study of mind/body interactions." The

study included some 1,800 volunteers, heart bypass patients at six hospitals.

They were monitored according to strict medical guidelines and randomly

assigned to be prayed for or not. One doctor who has seen a final version of

the study said it was the most rigorous trial on the subject to date.

Other experts say they wonder whether the study will be published at all, and

what is holding it up.

"He's got nothing, or we would have seen it by now," Dr. Sloan of Columbia said,

referring to Dr. Benson.

In an interview at his office, Dr. Benson acknowledged that at least two medical

journals had turned down the study after asking for revisions. He said that the

study was currently under review at another journal and that talking about the

results could jeopardize publication. "This is no routine paper," he said.

"What you're looking at obviously is not a typical intervention, not at all. We

are at the interface of science and religion here, and there are boundary issues

that you would not have for almost any other paper."

Dr. Benson, who has studied the links between spirituality and medicine for many

years, declined to answer when asked if he himself believed in the effects of

intercessory prayer, saying only that he believed in God.

"We know that praying for oneself can influence health, so that's what led us to

this topic," he said.

If researchers are struggling to prove that intercessory prayer has benefits for

health, at least one study hints that it could be harmful.

In a 1997 experiment involving 40 alcoholics in rehab, psychologists at the

University of New Mexico found that although intercessory prayers did not have

any effect on drinking patterns, the men and women in the study who knew they

were being prayed for actually did worse.

"It's not clear what that means," said Dr. William Miller, one of the study's

authors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/health/10prayer.html?ex=1098356761&ei=1&en=e775d3e928261c5a