Efficacy of Prayer: Where a US Study Goes Wrong
Iman Kurdi, Arab News
Saturday, 30, July, 2005 (23, Jumada al-Thani, 1426)
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=67698&d=30&m=7&y=2005
Apparently praying has no tangible benefit on healing the sick or so you might believe if you read some of the headlines recently making the news.
Its all down to an American study at Duke University in North Carolina, in the heart of the Bible belt. The study followed 748 patients who underwent heart surgery and examined whether prayer led to more favorable outcomes six months on. This followed from an earlier study that had found that prayer did lead to improved outcomes. In that smaller study, patients in the prayer group had fewer post-operative complications. However, in this larger study, no significant benefits were found.
On first sight, this seems rather disappointing. Its not that this finding makes an iota of difference to my belief in the power of prayer. Quite the opposite, I see it as a failure of the study, it failed to show something which billions of people over thousands of years have known to be true. But it would have been nice to have something for the scientific skeptics.
So often in my career I have come face to face with atheist or agnostic scientists who came close to accusing me of being stupid simply because I believed in something which could not be scientifically proven. But that is the essence of faith, you believe in something because you know it to be true, not because it has been scientifically shown to be true. Just as they saw me as weak for believing in something whose existence I could not prove to them, I saw them as weak for not being able to believe in something unless it could be proved to them.
Of course, the main debate has been about the existence of God. Except that it is not a debate. If you believe in God, you do not need proof. For me Gods existence is more real than the existence of my brother who happens to be sitting three feet across from me. But I know people who not only do not share this belief, but who cannot perceive the reality of it. They are genuinely perturbed by my faith.
Prayer is another matter, it is near universal. Even people who do not have strong religious beliefs find themselves praying every now and then. Prayer has been extended beyond the strictly religious definition. I have met people who pray in a generalized way, not overtly communicating with God in the sense that they do not verbalize to themselves the existence of God, instead they pray to an unnamed higher force, something bigger than themselves, an entity that has the power to help them in their hour of need. There are also those who pray within themselves, praying to find the force to overcome their distress, or praying to find the spiritual strength to heal their sickness.
This may seem odd from an Islamic perspective. For us God is so present in the way we live our daily lives that our awareness of His existence has become almost innate.
All the more reason why I have been fascinated by discussions with people here in Europe who professed not to be religious yet when questioned more deeply seemed to adhere to what I would describe as religious beliefs.
The crux of the matter seemed to be a strong disaffection for religion as opposed to faith, for doctrine and dogma rather than religious values. If being religious were equated with religious practice, then many of my friends at school and university would not describe themselves as religious, but if you asked them about what they believed to be right or wrong, their answers were almost identical to mine. As for praying, we defined it differently but most of us did it in some shape or form.
When someone is ill, it is in our nature to pray for them to get well. It follows that we must believe that our prayers will have some power to heal. I concede that partly we pray because it makes us feel better. In a situation where we are powerless, such as being faced with someone who is very sick, prayer is empowering. But the main reason we pray for the sick is because we believe that God can heal them and that God listens to our supplications.
Where the scientists at Duke University went wrong is that they asked the wrong question. They treated prayer as an alternate therapy. In the initial study it was one of four such therapies, the other three being guided imagery, stress relaxation and healing touch. They looked at it independent of faith and independent of a connection between patient and prayer. They asked various prayer groups to pray for people who had been admitted into hospital for heart surgery. Not only did those praying not know the person they were praying for (all they were told is the persons name, age and health condition) but the patient did not know that there were people out there praying for him or her to get well and stay well. Though the study made sense in terms of scientific design, it failed to
address
the very essence of what they were examining, namely prayer.
Still, it would have been nice to show that even this kind of dismembered prayer had a significant positive outcome on peoples health.
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