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Little surprise in new Duke prayer study
It's another slow news day, so here's another story that probably wouldn't otherwise make many headlines, if only because it sounds so familiar.

Duke University researchers are touting a new study as "the first time rigorous scientific protocols have been applied on a large scale to some of the world's most ancient healing traditions," including prayer. "The trends they observed may yield important clues to understanding the role of the human spirit in modern, technology-laden cardiovascular healthcare," says a press release.

The Washington Post has a different take on the study. Its story begins, "Praying for sick strangers does not improve their prospects of recovering, according to a large, carefully designed study that casts doubt on the widely held belief that being prayed for can help a person heal."

The study of 748 patients with coronary artery disease investigated the effects of distant intercessory prayer and of a therapy called MIT (bedside music, imagery, and touch). These were divided up roughly into quarters: One group got prayer and MIT therapy; one only got prayer; another only got MIT therapy; and a fourth got neither. Those getting prayer didn't know what group they were in, since the people praying were off-site strangers. Given the nature of MIT therapy, those receiving it knew it.

The headline-grabbing finding is that heart patients in the prayer group prayer were just as likely to have complications from their heart treatments, end up back in the hospital, or die within six months.

The details, however, are important.

"The prayer groups for the study were located throughout the world and included Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, and multiple Christianity-based denominations," says the press release. "The researchers noted 89 percent of the patients in this study also knew of someone praying for them outside of the study protocol altogether."

That latter part is a problem, the study itself notes, but hardly a surmountable one for now: "Many would have considered a request to patients or families not to pray for loved ones with heart disease unethical."

Indeed. But that means it's hardly a study of whether prayer keeps heart patients from problems, but rather a study of whether remote interfaith prayer has any additional effect than the prayer of loved ones.

Telling patients they are being prayed for has problems, too. "If the sick person believes the prayer will help, it may, just as a sugar pill may help if a doctor tells a patient it contains powerful medicine," as the Straight Dope explained in a 2000 column.

An editorial in The Lancet, where the study appears this week, notes that the matter is far from settled:

Could a more restricted denominational approach have influenced the outcome? Does the number of those praying matter? Or the timing and duration of prayer? Would it have been more fruitful to have used a battery of subtler qualitative endpoints? These questions—and the secondary endpoint of six-month mortality benefit in those assigned music, imagery, and touch [translation: those who got MIT therapy were less likely to die]—provide a basis for further inquiry.

Studies will almost certainly continue, as will the debates over whether prayer "works." For Christians, though, this study doesn't change anything.

First, as theologian N.T. (Tom) Wright told the BBC in 2003, when Duke University's earlier study on the subject similarly found prayer ineffective, "Prayer is not a penny in the slot machine. You can't just put in a coin and get out a chocolate bar."

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July (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49