Is there any proof that prayer is anything other than a feel good exercise?

Today at 10:32 AM Zadok001 said this in Post #15 Your statement is _exactly_ why, when conducting a test of prayer, one should correct for the placebo effect. In other words, the patients ought not know that the test is under way. No one but the observing sociologists and those praying should be aware that any prayer is occuring.

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All the studies are done by trained, qualified people who run double blind studies.

One thing I was just thinking of was the positive benifits of color therapy. When I was in collage people were very skeptical about the therapeutic value of light and colors. But now a lot of studies have been done showing the positive advantage.  

Today at 10:55 AM lucaspa said this in Post #18

"Neither this study nor that of Byrd provided any mechanistic explanation for the possible benefits of intercessory prayer. However, others have speculated as to what they might be10; they generally fall into 2 broad categories: natural or supernatural explanations. 

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It use to be popular to have a theory that there was a universal consciousness where people can effect one another. This was popular back around the time that the book: "To kill a mocking bird" came out. A book that was a study on mob mentality.

But I have not heard any thoughts of something like that for a quite a few years now. I read a book once on myths and popular manias. I actually learned enough from that book about how to make some money off of people with collectable items. Because there is a form of mania there. Then I questioned if that is a very good way to get people to give you their money.

I wonder about that when I read about the Hebrews when they left Egypt, the Egyptians gave them all their Gold. I wondered just what the Egyptians were thinking as to why they gave the Hebrew children all of their valuable items.

Exodus 12:35-36
    Now the children of Israel had done according to the word of Moses, and they had asked from the Egyptians articles of silver, articles of gold, and clothing. [36] And the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they granted them what they requested. Thus they plundered the Egyptians.





 

Yesterday at 03:48 PM Zadok001 said this in Post #10

The double-blind I was referring to didn't compare whether PATIENTS prayed. It took two hospitals, and had a group of devout Christians pray for the ill in one hospital. The second hospital was a control. Now, if prayer worked, the result should be that hospital A's recovery rate should exceed that of hospital B. This was not the case, and there was no discernable difference between the two hospitals. Hence, prayer does nothing.

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The problem with this analysis is that there is such a high background of prayer that negative results don't mean anything.  What is being measured is not prayer per se, but the little bit of extra prayer one group is receiving compared to another.  Not only that, but no one is denying the material benefits of modern health care.  So you are testing 1) the little bit extra total prayer is making above material care and 2) the little bit of extra prayer by the intercessors.  Trying to detect very small difference like that is very difficult.

Let's remember, if you are looking at overall hospital stay or overall cure rates, most hospital stays are prescribed by the procedure and most illnesses are cured or the patients recover. So those are not parameters to look for if you are trying to assess an effect.

BTW, you didn't cite the study.  What's the reference?

One final note.  You have to look at the debate carefully now to see what exactly is being debated.  We have two separate issues on the table:

1. Does intercessory prayer have an effect?

2. Is the effect large enough for it to be cost-effective for intercessory prayer to be included in standard therapy?

It's obvious that the answer to #1 can be "yes" while the answer to #2 can be "no".  So be sure which question is being addressed.

Today at 05:26 PM Eddie said this in Post #24

One at a time.  Byrd constructed a well designed study on the impact of incremental prayer against an uncontrolled background.  Kudos to him.

Unfortunately, there really is nothing there (I think, the stats he used were a bit unclear). 

When you look at the data, you find that Byrd is indeed using a shotgun.  That is perfectly fine considering that he is collecting the first data on this subject.   

Suffice it to say that running repeated significance tests on an inventory of attributes proves nothing since due to the nature of the underlying distribution one would expect  certain number of significant results. 

Yes, one would.  However, of 26 categories and a significance level of p< 0.05, you would expect 1 or 2 to be significant.  Byrd saw 5. 

I will see what I can do about reanalyzing the data.  I have also sent the data to an accomplished analyst for a look see, but I am virtually certain that I am correct on this. 

The data has already been analyzed by Cochrane Review, and they find it sound. Cochrane Reviews take all the papers on a subject and analyze them so that they can summarize the results for physicians and present them with recommendations.  I'll be happy to e-mail you the review if you would like.

A point to remember is that doctors tend not to be researchers.

I know that all too well.   After all, I'm a Ph.D. in a clinical department.  But in this case Byrd had already had 4 papers published in the peer-reviewed literature. You can find them, like I did, on PubMed. Byrd simply applied the same methodology he had used in drug testing on intercessory prayer, using prayer as a drug.

My analysis of the Results is below:
 RESULTS
Statistical analysis was done on the medical condition of the patients at time of admission.  There was no statistically significant difference between the medical conditions of patients in the control group and the prayer group.  This is important.  The 2 groups started out the same.  The parameters measured included age, gender, primary cardiac diagnosis, and preliminary noncardiac medical conditions (diabetes, pneumonia, drug overdose, etc.)  A total of 30 medical parameters were studied at entry.  As far as I can tell they cover the relevant areas. (I would think the reviewers would have picked this up if it were a problem.)

There was no difference in days in CCU, days in hospital, or number of drugs that needed to be taken after discharge between the two groups.  While the patients were in the hospital, 26 categories of new problems, diagnoses, and therapeutic effects were measured.  These included mortality (the patient died), congestive heart failure, need to be put on various drugs, hypotension (low blood pressure), major surgery, arrhythmia (irregular heart beats), etc.  Again, the categories seem relevant.   

Of the 26 categories, congestive heart failure, cardiopulmonary arrest (new heart attack), pneumonia, diuretics (drugs to control high blood pressure), antibiotics, and intubation/ventilation were seen less frequently in the prayer group at the statistically significant level of p < 0.05.  This is the level considered statistically significant in all other scientific studies.  What it means is that if you took all the patients and picked patients at random into 2 groups, 1 time out of 20 you would get 2 groups that would give these results.

The significance of the 6 parameters that were statistically different does not tell the whole story.  In 14 other parameters, the prayer group was less than the controls, in one they were the same, and were worse in only 5 areas.  Also, the chi-square test is not that sensitive.  For instance, for diuretics 5 patients in the prayer group needed them compared to 15 in the controls.  That is statistically different.  But for major surgery before discharge 5 patients in the prayer group and 14 in the control group had it.  That difference of 1 patient means it was not quite statistically different.  Or in congestive heart failure 8 patients in the prayer group vs 20 in the control was statistically significant.  In the category of receiving ionotropic agents (drugs to help the heart beat) 8 patients in the prayer group compared to 16 in the control was not statistically different.  For antianginal agents 21 patients in the prayer group needed them compared to 19 in the controls. 

Thus there is a trend.  Where the prayer group is better, in 14 categories it is a lot better by 30-50% fewer patients.  In the 5 categories where prayer is "worse" it is only by 1 or 2 patients.  Example, 2 patients in the prayer group needed a permanent pacemaker compared to 1 in the control.

Byrd did an multivariant analysis between the groups.  This compensates for variations among the areas.  For instance, prayer might be significant in antibiotics but controls might be close to significant in a lot of other areas and the overall effect might no difference between the groups.  Multivariant analysis will pick that up.  In the multivariant analysis the prayer group was significantly different at the p < 0.0001 level.  That means that only 1 in ten thousand tries would these results show up by chance.  Most of us dream of p values like this.  (In a statistically rigorous world, p values should never be compared.  You pick your p value at the beginning of the study and then only say results were significant or not significant.  However, I have never yet seen a statistically rigorous MD unless there were a statistician standing next to him pointing a gun at his head.)

Byrd also graded the hospital stay as "good", "intermediate", or "bad" based on what happened during the stay.  "Good" was when no new problems arose or only those problems that minimally increased the risk of mortality or morbidity, "intermediate" was higher levels of risk, "bad" was the highest morbidity or those who died during the study.   85% of the patients in the prayer group were "good" compared to 73% of the controls, 1% prayer vs 5% control for intermediate, and 14% prayer vs 22% control for bad.  Prayer was statistically different from control at p < 0.01. 

Now, it appears that Byrd had broken the code when he did this analysis, but it turns out that it is "robust".  That is, if you put all the intermediate in the "good" category, or all the intermediates in the "bad" category, the statistical results are the same.  Thus, Byrd appears to be 1) an honest grader and 2) even if he shaded a bit, the categorization is so marked that any possible shading doesn't matter.
 

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Today at 05:32 PM Eddie said this in Post #25

i cannot get the full text of this, only the abstract.  It appears that p=.04 which suggests that the results are not different from random .  Remember, there is no "almost". 

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Eddie, in the scientific literature the cutoff is p is less than 0.05.  Thus, 0.04 is accepted as statistically significantly different in all studies.  You can't make an exception for this one. 

Just check out the medical literature.

PS: that p is less than 0.05 means that there is a 1 in 20 chance that the difference was obtained by chance as you picked samples out of the population.  All statistics are that way.  It's playing the odds.  Science has consensually accepted the 1 in 20 chance as acceptable.

Today at 05:51 PM Eddie said this in Post #27

The answer to #1 is "unproven"

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This appears to be your judgement call. What do you accept as "proven"?  We have a replicated experiment of intercessory prayer having an effect in cardiac ICU units.  Two studies, two groups, identical results.

There are two other studies showing IP has an effect in two other situations.  How many studies would it take for you to be convinced to accept the results as (provisionally) true?

A couple more papers found on tonight's PubMed search:
1: Dusek JA, Sherwood JB, Friedman R, Myers P, Bethea CF, Levitsky S, Hill PC, Jain MK, Kopecky SL, Mueller PS, Lam P, Benson H, Hibberd PL.

Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP): study design and research methods. Am Heart J. 2002 Apr;143(4):577-84.
The abstract doesn't give the results of this one, we're going to have to look it up.

2: Leibovici L.
Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients withbloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial.
BMJ. 2001 Dec 22-29;323(7327):1450-1.

Yesterday at 10:42 PM Eddie said this in Post #32
I am sorry, I missed the second study. 

14.  Byrd, RC, Positive theraputic  effects of intercessory prayer in a  coronary care population. Southern Med Jour 1988 81(7):826-29. http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/smj1.html
15. WS Harris, M Gowda, JW Kolb, CP Strychacz, JL Vacek, PG Jones, A Forker, JH O'Keefe, BD McCallister,  A randomized, controlled trial of the effects of remote, intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients admitted to the coronary care unit.  Arch Intern Med. 1999;159:2273-2278 http://archinte.ama-assn.org/issues/v159n19/rfull/ioi90043.html

These are the two studies in a cardiac ICU.  The news article on the North Carolina study would constitute a third study, but that apparently hasn't been published in the peer-review literature, so we won't consider it.

If so, I would love to see the original study in it's entirety.  I assume from your comments that it was a reasonably close replication, yes? 

Very close, but designed to eliminate the "flaws" in the Byrd study. There were three changes: 
1. A general health scoring system was devised ahead of time, so there was a single assessment instead of Byrd's categories.
2. The patients were unaware that a study was going on, so there was no possible placebo effect from knowing they might be prayed for and agnostics and atheists were included because they couldn't decline.
3. The statistician was out-of-state and therefore was sent the data blind and analyzed the groups blind.

I won't quibble over the p values, but just between us girls, we know it was not "equal" to .04, right? 

No.  How can you talk about doing statistics and not know that, when you calculate a t or F value, you go look the value in a table and find the exact p value?  This undermines all credibility of your objections to the statistical analysis. 

Also,  think that you might find a defined p value will vary depending upon the situation.  For stuff like this I would, personally, have erred on the conservative side.

Why? As I said, a p less than 0.05 is taken for all other scientific studies.  You want them to cater to your faith prejudices? 

Controlling variables that did not seem to be included were behavioral and demographic factors.  I mean race, prior medical history, smoking, drinking, drug use, prior medical care (just whether they got regular checkups), stuff like that. 

Sorry, but most of that was included.  Prior medical history was included, as evidenced by an equal distribution of prior heat conditions, diabetes, etc.  The rest gets evened out due to the randomization procedure.  That the parameters Byrd checked for were equally distributed means that the parameters not checked for were also equally distributed.

And yes, if potentially confounding factors were taken into account, and if the stats are solid, and if it was replicated, I would accept the results as being highly provocative.  I would like to see a large scale replication before provisional acceptance. 

That's what the Harris study is: large scale replication.  Remember, you need large numbers in these studies because you are looking for a very small effect.

I am troubled a bit by the teeneyness of the effects, at the tail, as it were.  This sets off an ill defined bell. 

In this case, it shouldn't. Remember, there is no way to control the background of intercessory prayer: from family, from the patient, from friends, from the patients' churches.  You are not comparing no prayer to prayer, but a lot of prayer to a bit more prayer.  Therefore the differences are going to be small.

Look at it this way: comparing the cure rate for breast cancer of total mastectomy to partial mastectomy.  Would you expect a large difference? No.  But if you saw a small effect in favor of one or the other, would you reject it?

edit to add:  Also, I'd really like to know how many physicians attended to whom, ie, is there a caregiver effect. 

The physicians and staff were unaware of who was in each group.  That's what a "double-blind" study is.  It eliminates care-giver effects.

Here is something I found of interest.

http://www.theelijahchallenge.org/Egypt02%20Report%20-%20Documented%20Healings.htm

Today at 09:58 AM DocBrown said this in Post #34

Here is something I found of interest.

http://www.theelijahchallenge.org/Egypt02%20Report%20-%20Documented%20Healings.htm

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In the medical literature, this is what is referred to as "anecdotal evidence".  Since there are no outside observers or documentation, it can't be part of science. It's one-time personal experience.