EggplantTrent

This guy I'm debating with just gave me this link, in a series of link that states that prayer actually does work. What do you guys think of this link?

http://www.proofgodexists.org/scient...ayer_under.htm

EggplantTrent

enigma555

Placebos 'work' also...

Calzaer

But how?

Corona688

It's a psychological effect, is the best theory i've heard. The mind affects the body in many and complex ways, so it's not just a single 'placebo affect'. It's a byproduct of the way our body and brain interact.

Answerer

Come on, I don't see how prayer could heal a SARS patient without sending him to hospital.

Undercurrent

This has some mention of some of the studies about intercessory prayer in regards to health. It talks in particular of one where the prayed-for group does no better by any empirical measure than the controls, but the researchers, a posteriori decide on a new "intuitive" measure by which the prayer group does better. This quality of scholarship is hardly reassuring.

Ockhamite

If theists want to scientifically prove that prayer works, they should pray for better experimental results. What they have so far is not at all convincing.

You are aware that SARS patients will almost always recover, regardless of medical attention.....or prayer.

Azathoth

Nope.Prayer shows no effect in a study done by the Mayo clinic.

http://www.mayo.edu/proceedings/2001/dec/7612a1.pdf

RBH

Some time ago a physician acquaintance of mine with distinct "New-Agey" inclinations claimed that he'd read a study that showed that prayer by distant unknown people led to better results in treatment of AIDs patients. I ran down the paper and read it. It was fairly well designed, with appropriate randomizations and blind protocols. Unfortunately, there were just 10 patients per treatment condition (prayer vs. no prayer), and even though the patients were assigned randomly to the two groups, the luck of the draw put the patients with better histories and better prognoses in the prayer group. The authors didn't mention that; I had to dig it out of the data. Nevertheless, the authors concluded that on 4 of 10 or so outcome measures the prayer group did better than the control, with no difference on the other half-dozen or so outcome measures. But that almost exactly matched their pre-treatment differences from the control, so the treatment actually had zero effect.

The most discouraging result of that exercise was that the physician refused to believe that the prayer treatment was ineffective. That still boggles me.

RBH

Philosoft

Not a single one of the prayer studies has been valid, for at least one obvious reason: there is no way to ensure that a control group is in fact receiving no prayer, curse, hex, whatever.