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Prayer. Does it Really Work? Why?

Well written Dave.

What evidence? I have no more evidence this is what happened than any other explanation. Can't you take it on faith that what I say happened is the Truth?

If the cousins cancer was cured by prayer to a higher being, then for what purpose? Was God not paying attention to that person for a while, and accidentally let the cancer grow? That's not likely, since the Christian God is all knowing and all powerful. When the prayers showed up in his inbox, did he read them and say "D'oh! Ha ha, silly me!" and then wave his fingers and make the cancer go away? That makes no sense because we supposedly cannot know the mind of God, and therefore would be unable to sway his opinion and plans. Did God think to himself "Drat, I really needed cousin Tom up here, but his family prayed, so I can't have him. Hmmmm, ok how about aunt Muriel out in Phoenix, she never prays, so I'll give her brain cancer tomorrow."

Is it not significantly more likely that the cousin's malady and your mothers cancer are simply not yet fully understood by modern science and medicine and it is not possible to assign a 100% accurate estimate of progression and outcome to every case encountered by the physicians?
 
Did God think to himself "Drat, I really needed cousin Tom up here, but his family prayed, so I can't have him. Hmmmm, ok how about aunt Muriel out in Phoenix, she never prays, so I'll give her brain cancer tomorrow."

This is just my opinion, I am not claiming to be Biblically based, just my opinion. God's original plan for us was a perfect life. He gave us free will and we made our choice. When we started doing our thing, diseases appeared and new ones regularly pop up and in turn people die and when we do liev without disease our lives have got shorter. People get diseases, it is a part of our lives. I don't think God has a wheel of fortune that he spins to decide who gets the next tumor.

Is it not significantly more likely that the cousin's malady and your mothers cancer are simply not yet fully understood by modern science and medicine and it is not possible to assign a 100% accurate estimate of progression and outcome to every case encountered by the physicians?

No
 
I would like to make that my first church,,,,, But I will let you talk to my wife about that!!!!!!!! I also know where their is a nice little place in the mtns that has pews, pulpit, and everything!! Maybe I can convince here that will work since part of praying is sitting on something hard and uncomfortable..... So I am told...... Mike

Mike, I tried and tried to find that on the internet but couldn't, so While you are out grooming take a pic.. hehe.. No, I will do that when i can convince Bill to take a snowmobile trip over to Meadowlark. Hey, guys and gals, it is an awesome place. Whoever did it years ago, made homemade pews and a concrete alter.. It is cool. I am going to get pics for ya.. Good one Mike.. I told mtn topper on our 50th I want to be remarried there.. Don't think the Catholic Church would mind..hmmmmm
 
Unfortunately, the man who's CAT scans were mixed up with your cousins was told to take two Excedrin Migraine, and is now dead because of his untreated cancer. His family says it must have been "God's will" that he be taken away from them at such a young age.

Dave, still waiting for your evidence on these.
  • How do you know that the man's CAT scans were mixed up?
  • How do you know that that man is now dead because of untreated cancer?
  • How do you know that the man was prescribed 2 Excedrin?
You are making statements as if they are declarative facts and you then you suggest that my mom's survival was not related to some sort of prayer but rather to medical ignorance. Well I'll admit that the doctors are the Mayo Clinic were ignorant. But that does not discount the power of faith and prayer.

Similarly Brents cousin was 'cured' by prayer. Medical ignorance again. Again I say yes. Ignorant to the fact that prayer seems to work.

Now I am not suggesting that my church did a better job than Brents church, both pray to the same God but have pretty dramatically different beliefs in how it is done. I'm simply saying, as per the title of the thread, that there is plenty of evidence to show that prayer has an effect on healing and wellness. I understand that some don't believe it.

So since you are not willing/able to back up your statements, let me submit this, it should be secular enough for you, and it does not have definitive conclusions but certainly leads to a greater understanding of the role of 'prayer' in healing . . . From WebMD's website:
Does prayer have the power to heal? Scientists have some surprising answers.
By Jeanie L. Davis
WebMD Feature Reviewed by Michael W. Smith, MD

Could it be possible? Could the prayers of a handful of people help someone -- even someone on the other side of the world -- facing heart surgery?

A few years back, Roy L. was heading into his third heart procedure -- an angioplasty and stent placement. Doctors were going to thread a catheter up a clogged artery, open it up, and insert a little device, the stent, to prop it open. It's a risky procedure under the best of circumstances. "The risks are the big ones -- death, stroke, heart attack," says his doctor, Mitchell Krucoff, MD, a cardiovascular specialist at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C.

"You're mighty thankful you came out of it," Roy tells WebMD

Though he didn't know it, Roy may have had some help getting through the procedure, some nonmedical help. Later, he learned he was on the receiving end of prayers before, during, and after the procedure -- prayers sent from nuns, monks, priests, and rabbis all over the world, with his name attached to them.

"I'm not a church-going man, but I believe in the Lord," he tells WebMD. "If somebody prays for me, I sure appreciate it." And he's doing well now, with his heart problems anyway. The only thing plaguing him presently is the onset of diabetes.

Roy was part of a pilot study looking at the effects of "distant prayer" on the outcome of patients undergoing high-risk procedures.

But did prayers help Roy survive the angioplasty? Did they help ameliorate some of the stress that might have complicated things? Or do a person's own religious beliefs -- our personal prayers -- have an effect on well-being? Is there truly a link between mere mortals and the almighty, as some recent neurological studies have seemed to show?

Those are questions that Krucoff and others are attempting to answer in a growing number of studies.

God Grabs Headlines
Research focusing on the power of prayer in healing has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, says David Larson, MD, MSPH, president of the National Institute for Healthcare Research, a private nonprofit agency.

Even the NIH -- which "refused to even review a study with the word prayer in it four years ago" -- is now funding one prayer study through its Frontier Medicine Initiative. Although it's not his study, Krucoff says it's nevertheless evidence that "things are changing."

Krucoff has been studying prayer and spirituality since 1996 -- and practicing it much longer in his patient care. Earlier studies of the subject were small and often flawed, he says. Some were in the form of anecdotal reports: "descriptions of miracles ... in patients with cancer, pain syndromes, heart disease," he says.

"[Today,] we're seeing systematic investigations -- clinical research -- as well as position statements from professional societies supporting this research, federal subsidies from the NIH, funding from Congress," he tells WebMD. "All of these studies, all the reports, are remarkably consistent in suggesting the potential measurable health benefit associated with prayer or spiritual interventions."

Wired for Spirituality?
For the past 30 years, Harvard scientist Herbert Benson, MD, has conducted his own studies on prayer. He focuses specifically on meditation, the Buddhist form of prayer, to understand how mind affects body. All forms of prayer, he says, evoke a relaxation response that quells stress, quiets the body, and promotes healing.

Prayer involves repetition -- of sounds, words -- and therein lies its healing effects, says Benson. "For Buddhists, prayer is meditation. For Catholics, it's the rosary. For Jews, it's called dovening. For Protestants, it's centering prayer. Every single religion has its own way of doing it."

Benson has documented on MRI brain scans the physical changes that take place in the body when someone meditates. When combined with recent research from the University of Pennsylvania, what emerges is a picture of complex brain activity:

As an individual goes deeper and deeper into concentration, intense activity begins taking place in the brain's parietal lobe circuits -- those that control a person's orientation in space and establish distinctions between self and the world. Benson has documented a "quietude" that then envelops the entire brain.

At the same time, frontal and temporal lobe circuits -- which track time and create self-awareness -- become disengaged. The mind-body connection dissolves, Benson says.

And the limbic system, which is responsible for putting "emotional tags" on that which we consider special, also becomes activated. The limbic system also regulates relaxation, ultimately controlling the autonomic nervous system, heart rate, blood pressure, metabolism, etc., says Benson.

The result: Everything registers as emotionally significant, perhaps responsible for the sense of awe and quiet that many feel. The body becomes more relaxed and physiological activity becomes more evenly regulated.

Does all this mean that we are communicating with a higher being -- that we are, in fact, "hard-wired" at the factory to do just that? That interpretation is purely subjective, Benson tells WebMD. "If you're religious, this is God-given. If you're not religious, then it comes from the brain."

The Impact of Religion on Health

But prayer is more than just repetition and physiological responses, says Harold Koenig, MD, associate professor of medicine and psychiatry at Duke and a colleague of Krucoff's.

Traditional religious beliefs have a variety of effects on personal health, says Koenig, senior author of the Handbook of Religion and Health, a new release that documents nearly 1,200 studies done on the effects of prayer on health.

These studies show that religious people tend to live healthier lives. "They're less likely to smoke, to drink, to drink and drive," he says. In fact, people who pray tend to get sick less often, as separate studies conducted at Duke, Dartmouth, and Yale universities show. Some statistics from these studies:

Hospitalized people who never attended church have an average stay of three times longer than people who attended regularly.

Heart patients were 14 times more likely to die following surgery if they did not participate in a religion.

Elderly people who never or rarely attended church had a stroke rate double that of people who attended regularly.

In Israel, religious people had a 40% lower death rate from cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Also, says Koenig, "people who are more religious tend to become depressed less often. And when they do become depressed, they recover more quickly from depression. That has consequences for their physical health and the quality of their lives."

Koenig's current study -- conducted with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the first to be funded by the NIH -- involves 80 black women with early-stage breast cancer. Half the women will be randomly assigned to participate in a prayer group, and will choose eight women in their church to form the group.

In the prayer group, he says, "[the support team] will pray for her; she will pray for them," Koenig says. "They will offer each other psychological support, talk about things that are bothering them." During the six-month trial period, each patient will be monitored for changes in immune function.

Religion provides what Koenig calls "a world view," a perspective on problems that helps people better cope with life's ups and downs.

"Having that world view helps people integrate difficult life changes and relieves the stress that goes along with them," Koenig says. "A world view also gives people a more optimistic attitude -- gives them more hope, a sense of the future, of purpose, of meaning in their lives. All those things get threatened when we go through difficult periods. Unless one has a religious belief system, it's hard to find purpose and meaning in getting sick and having chronic pain and losing loved ones."

"Nobody's prescribing religion as a treatment," Koenig tells WebMD. "That's unethical. You can't tell patients to go to church twice week. We're advocating that the doctor should learn what the spiritual needs of the patient are and get the pastor to come in to give spiritually encouraging reading materials. It's very sensible."

When We Pray for Others
But what of so-called "distant prayer" -- often referred to as "intercessory prayer," as in Krucoff's studies?

"Intercessory prayer is prayer geared toward doing something -- interrupting a heart attack or accomplishing healing," says Krucoff, who wears numerous hats at Duke and at the local Veterans Affairs Medical Center. An associate professor of medicine in cardiology, Krucoff also directs the Ischemia Monitoring Core Laboratory and co-directs the MANTRA (Monitoring and Actualization of Noetic Teachings) prayer study project at Duke. Long-time nurse practitioner Suzanne Crater co-directs that study.

Noetic trainings? "Those are complementary therapies that do not involve tangible elements," says Krucoff. "There are no herbs, no massages, no acupressure."

The goal of prayer therapy is to accomplish healing, yet "there are a lot of questions about what healing means," Krucoff tells WebMD. "At this level of this work, there are many philosophical debates that can emerge. The basic concept is this -- if you add prayer to standard, high-tech treatment -- if you motivate a spiritual force or energy, does it actually make people better, heal faster, get out of the hospital faster, make them need fewer pills, suffer less?

When We Pray for Others continued...
Roy L. and 150 other patients took part in MANTRA's pilot study. All suffer from acute heart disease, and all needed emergency angioplasty.

The stress of the procedure -- because it is done on patients who are awake -- has its own negative effects on the body, Krucoff tells WebMD. "The heart beats faster, beats harder, blood vessels are constricted, blood is thicker and clots more easily. All that's bad." But if an intervention could mediate that stress, it would potentially be a pretty useful adjunct for people coming in for angioplasty, he says.

In the pilot study, the patients were assigned to a control group or to touch therapy, stress relaxation, imagery, or distant prayer. A therapist came to the bedsides of patients in the touch, stress-relaxation, and imagery groups, but not to the bedsides in the control or distant-prayer groups. Like Roy, people in those two groups didn't know whether prayers were being sent their way or not.

Those early results "were very suggestive that there may be a benefit to these therapies," Krucoff tells WebMD.

Krucoff and Crater are now involved in the MANTRA trial's second phase, which will ultimately enroll 1,500 patients undergoing angioplasty at nine clinical centers around the country.

Patients will be randomly assigned to one of four study groups: (1) they might be "prayed for" by the religious groups; (2) they might receive a bedside form of spiritual therapy involving relaxation techniques; (3) they might be prayed for and receive bedside spiritual therapy -- the "turbo-charged group," as Krucoff calls it; or they might get none of the extra spiritual therapies.

"We're not looking at prayer as an alternative to angioplasty," he adds. "We're very high-tech people here. We're looking at whether in all of the energy and interest we have put into systematic investigation of high-tech medicine, if we have actually missed the boat. Have we ignored the rest of the human being -- the need for something more -- that could make all the high-tech stuff work better?"​
 
The beauty about the internet is no matter what you want to argue you can always find something to counter with.
I pray that my wife will leave, to date it has not worked.

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/04.06/05-prayer.html
[SIZE=-1]HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES[/SIZE]​
5-prayer1-450.jpg
[SIZE=-1]Herbert Benson led a study to determine if prayers by congregations who did not know heart bypass patients would reduce the complications of surgery. They didn't. In fact, some prayed-for patients fared worse than those who did not receive prayers. (Staff file photo Jon Chase/Harvard News Office) [/SIZE]
Prayers don't help heart surgery patients

Some fare worse when prayed for

By William J. Cromie
[SIZE=-1]Harvard News Office [/SIZE]​

Many - if not most - people believe that prayer will help you through a medical crisis such as heart bypass surgery. If a large group of people outside yourself, your family, and your friends add their prayers, that should be even more helpful, or so such reasoning goes.
Researchers have been trying to prove this and even to measure the effect of prayer. Since 1988, at least two studies have found that third-party prayers bestow benefits, but two others concluded that there are no benefits. These and other studies have been soundly criticized for flaws in both method and outcome. The fuzzy results goaded researchers to conduct the largest and most scientifically rigid investigation to date. It covered 1,802 people who underwent coronary bypass surgery at six different hospitals from Oklahoma City to Boston. The cost was $2.4 million, paid by the John Templeton Foundation and the Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation of Memphis.
In a clear setback for those who believe in the power of prayer, their prayers were not answered. Prayers offered by strangers did not reduce the medical complications of major heart surgery. Not only that, but patients who knew that others were praying for them fared worse than those who did not receive such spiritual support, or who did but were not aware of receiving it.
05-prayer.jpg
[SIZE=-1]Dusek [/SIZE] "We thought that the certainty of knowing about the prayers of outsiders would reduce complications that accompany bypass surgery," notes Jeffrey Dusek, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. "But the results were paradoxical."
Dusek and his colleagues are quick to say that the study results do not challenge the existence of God. Also, the investigators did not try to address such religious questions as the efficacy of one form of prayer over others, whether God answers intercessory prayers, or whether prayers from one religious group work better than prayers from another, according to the Rev. Dean Marek, a chaplain at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
Other participants in the study, who include researchers from Harvard Medical School and Harvard affiliates Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston, agree. As do the teams from medical institutions in Oklahoma City, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tenn., and Rochester, Minn.
Some skeptics believe that studying prayer wastes time and money because its reach goes beyond science. Dusek and Marek, scientist and clergyman, disagree. There's enough anecdotal evidence that prayer influences recovery after surgery and in other circumstance to take a scientific look at the results, they say. "Physicians and health-care providers want to understand if prayer can be used as part of medical treatment," Dusek points out. "In this example, could prayer be used in addition to drugs and other treatments to reduce the complications of coronary bypass surgery?"
The answer apparently is "no."
STEP up to pray

Known as STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer), it investigated patients undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery, wherein a vein is grafted into the heart to bypass clogged blood vessels. According to the STEP report, 350,000 people in the United States and 800,000 people worldwide have such grafts each year, making it one of the most common surgical procedures.
Researchers enrolled the first patients in STEP in 1998. Collection of data ended in 2001 and analyses of it were finished in 2005. People of any or no religious faith were eligible to participate. Those chosen included Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and people of no faith.
The 1,802 participants were divided into three groups of about 600 each, with a mean age of 64 years. One group received no prayers. A second group received prayers after being told that they may or may not be prayed for. Members of the third group were informed that others would pray for them for 14 days starting on the night before their surgery.
The prayers came from three Christian groups, two Catholic and one Protestant. The investigators report that, "We were unable to locate other Christian, Jewish, on non-Christian groups that could receive the daily prayer list required for the study." Such lists provided the first name and initial of the last name of the patients.
The intercessors could pray in any way they wished but with limitations. Prayers started at a standardized time, lasted a given duration, and included the message "for successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications." This system provided a practical way to conduct the research, but limited its results to one type of prayer.
Many different kinds of complications can occur during, and for 30 days following the surgeries, such as abnormal heart rhythms. Among the group that knew outsiders were praying for them, researchers recorded 197 cardiac complications, compared with 187 and 158 in the other two groups. Eighteen percent of those who received outside prayer without their knowledge suffered major complications like heart attack or stroke, compared with only 13 percent of the group that went without such support.
In total, complications occurred in 59 percent of those who were prayed for, compared with 51 percent of those who received no prayers, a significant difference.
Deaths during the 30 days after surgery were similar across groups, 13 and 16 in the prayed-for group, 14 in the no-prayer group.
The big mystery is why there was an excess of complications in patients who knew all those people were praying for them. The researchers admit they have "no clear explanation."
One theory is that those who knew so many outsiders were praying for them felt a stressful anxiety to do well. "It might have made them uncertain, wondering, Am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?" says Charles Bethea, a cardiologist at Integris Baptist Medical Center, who was part of the research group in Oklahoma City.
"We found increased amounts of adrenalin, a sign of stress, in the blood of patients who knew strangers were praying for them," notes Dusek, who is also associate research director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute. "It's possible that we inadvertently raised the stress levels of these people."
The full STEP report was published in the April 4 issue of the American Heart Journal. Herbert Benson, director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and lead author of that report, notes it is not the last word on the effects of intercessory prayer. Questions raised by the study, he says, "will require additional answers."
 
Vin, if you look at the WebMD report I quoted, it actually cites many of the older studies and suggests they were flawed. You cited one of those older studies. Older studies have been used to prove prayer worked. Older studies have been used to prove prayer does NOT work. The most neutral, and certainly the most scientifically valid study I could find is still ongoing, but it is discussed in the WebMD article. It shows plenty of evidence to suggest that there is something to 'prayer' but also shows much of what Cityboy is referring to and that is that 'prayer' does not have to be from a specific religion.
 
Bob, Given that my article (By William J. Cromie ) was published in 2006 and the article you posted was in 2001 I doubt your comment. I look forward to your rebuttal.
 
Sorry, but your article kept referring to dates in the 1980's and 1990's, so at very least it used old studies. I saw no link, and no date of publication on your article, but I did see the references to the old studies. Your study also finished collecting data in 2001 and was simply one study.

The WebMD article I sited indicated that it looked at several studies, it even concluded some on each side were flawed. It seemed very much neutral with only the agenda of finding the truth. It clearly did not indicate it had such truth, but said that further study was warranted, and suggested that different types of prayer methods may have different results (personal prayer as opposed to group prayer as opposed to congregation prayer and even suggested that blind studies were needed). You will notice in the article you cited that there was intercessory prayer, with limits. The study I provided suggested that different approaches merited study.

My reply, therefore, is your study is limited in scope, flawed in execution, and uses old studies as its basis.
 
Sorry, but your article kept referring to dates in the 1980's and 1990's, so at very least it used old studies. I saw no link, and no date of publication on your article,
....
My reply, therefore, is your study is limited in scope, flawed in execution, and uses old studies as its basis.

"Researchers enrolled the first patients in STEP in 1998. Collection of data ended in 2001 and analyses of it were finished in 2005."
Where do you get the idea it uses old studies?
The article was published in 2006 as per the link!
It was done with a strict criteria and used a large number of people, 1800 in fact.
It must be flawed in execution if you say so or do you have some facts?

"The WebMD article I sited indicated that it looked at several studies, it even concluded some on each side were flawed. It seemed very much neutral with only the agenda of finding the truth."
If you believe this you believe in anything.


BUT IT CERTAINLY DID NOT CITE THIS STUDY BECAUSE THIS STUDY HAD NOT YET BEEN COMPLETED

If you would like read a "webmd" review of this study here is the link.http://www.webmd.com/balance/guide/20070201/praying-for-health-study-stirs-debate

D
on't ask me to show the data. I am sure if you wish to see the data you could email Harvard University and they would let you have the data, but I am sure it is better to let the experts interpret data.

If you are open minded you will see this studied the effect of prayer and eliminated any relaxation response of prayer. Makes it very legitimate compared to other studies if you want to know if prayer in the true sense works.
 
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