COMensarations
Friday, March 31, 2006
The ‘Power’ of Prayer
It wasn’t quite what they were expecting.
A recently released report of an experiment run to test the power of prayer in helping people recover from coronary problems says it didn’t help.
Indeed, the report said it had a negative effect....
In fact, the researchers from Harvard Medical School and five other U.S. medical centers found - to their bewilderment - that coronary bypass patients who knew strangers were praying for them fared significantly worse than people who got no prayers.
That’s an interesting development. It runs countrary to other reports from other experiments run earlier.
The researchers think....
The team speculated that telling the patients about the prayers may have caused ‘‘performance anxiety,’’ or perhaps a fear that doctors expected the worst.
My personal experience with prayer has been in the affirmative. Not only for myself, but for others I’ve prayed for. That includes medical issues. And I’m wondering if the researchers took notice of the religious beliefs of the subjects in this experiment. Would prayer for a non-christian by a christian have different results than if the subject had been a christian? Considering the expense and extensive nature of this particular experiment, one would think they’d have THAT data avaiable.