Prayer is bad for your health!

Between the years 1997-2005 there was a very interesting experiment conducted at Harvard, trying to statistically probe the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in Cardiac Bypass Patients.

Cardiologist Prof. Herbert Benson and his colleagues randomly assigned over 1800 cardiac bypass patients to one of three conditions:

• Group 1: those told they may or may not be prayed for (and who weren't) - 604 patients
• Group 2: those told they may or may not be prayed for (and who were) - 601 patients
• Group 3: those told they would be prayed for (and who were) - 604 patients

Experiment:
The experiment cost over 2.0$ million, involving 6 medical centers, 6 different Christian congregations, signed approval of participants and a medical team which was not involved in the secret maintained neutral to the end result.

Prayers:
The members of the 2 prayed-for groups were prayed by members of 6 different congregations and/or family members. The prayers were allowed to pray in their own manner, but they were instructed to include the following phrase in their prayers: “for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.” Prayers began the night before the surgery and continued daily for two weeks after. The researchers monitored the patients for 30 days after the operations.

Results

or, in short:

• Group 1 : 52% complications.
• Group 2 : 51% complications.
• Group 3 : 59% complications.

52% is the common ratio in the overall population = reference value.

Conclusions:

Or:
Not only did prayer not help the patients, those that were told they were being prayed for experienced more complications.
The reason is simple: being aware that people is praying for you and speaking about you with god just makes you more tense ---> being tense is bad for your heart.

My comment:
In the above analysis, it is assumed that god co-operated with the experiment and "behaved" like he always "behaves" as if there is no experiment

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[sup]**[/sup]For those who never took a course in statistics...
In simple words and using the experiment figures, the "95% confidence intervals" means this: my calculation show that if the complications rate in group 3 was of 64% instead of 59%, then would could say that "within no more than 5% probability of being mistaken, the prayers were the cause of the extra complications in group 3". However, mathematically, from these data all we can presently say is that "there is a higher probability that being aware of prayers will cause complications", because there is a risk of a statistical effect (= picking different group of 600 people would change the results).
However, if there were 10,000 participants in the experiment, then every 1% would be statistically significant. Maybe they should spend 200 million $ on another, similar experiment, and finally prove beyond any doubt that prayers don't help! !

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Sources:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16569567?
http://freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Harvard_prayer_experiment
http://www.amazon.com/God-Experiment-Science-Prove-Existence/dp/1587680076 <---- how I learned about this, recommended book
http://www.dimaggio.org/Eye-Openers/prayer_does_not_work.htm
http://www.templeton.org/pdfs/press_releases/060407STEP_paper.pdf <---- the full scientific paper

 

I don't agree that prayer is bad for health. On the contrary prayer heals a person. I don't understand how someone can take liberty with things related to God.

 

not at least according to the experiment above.

What do you mean by "taking liberty with things related to god"?

 

I think what he means is, the parrot isn't dead, it's pining.

 

you may have your own perspective about things but I don't understand how prayer is bad for health. secondly, prayer is related to god and one cannot degrade the value of prayer, that's what I meant.

 

Exercise bad for health? prayer is a daily exercise

 

Scientifically, it may or may not be right. You can't conclude my conducting a single experiment. But the alternate is that One can Pray in Mind

 

The experiment concluded that prayers don't work.

Patients that were aware that they're part of the experiment developed what they called "anxiety" and suffered from trying to over-perform.

 

I am with you, and I think that prayer should be held in high esteem. It's necessary for us.

 

prayer is a daily exercise. You can technically use this 'experiment' on any exercise and you can see it does put some kind of stress on your body. Not necessarily bad stress.

Someone should validate this 'experiment'

 

That will depend on what is the meaning of prayer for each, even among those who follow the same religion, or belief,

for some it is a demand to God to give or do something, and if this something did not happen, or was not given, then they develop a belief of the non existence of God, already those have a wrong idea about prayer which came maybe from a wrong idea they had about God, maybe as an old man sitting on cloud, who has wife and kids,

for some others it is a sport for the body and soul, or a spiritual connection with the inner-self and God, similar to meditation except here it is concentrated around God and not open imagination or the void,

prayer itself is like food, can be good or bad depending on our understanding and use of it, whether it is demanding God, or worshiping God, believing that prayer itself is bad for health is equal to believing that God will send you 1 million every time you demand him (pray for some)

in other words simpler to understand for atheists, we know that tense is bad for heart, not prayer, now in the light of the above, prayer can cause tense, so can a conversation with the patient, it can cause tense too, and it can also cause calmness/relaxation, depending on the type of that conversation.

 

So basically you say that the 2 prayer-for group were "wrongly prayed"?
If you taught the people of groups 1 + 3 how to pray, will it change the results?
Do you think that if you pray for somebody in a similar situation, this increases his chances to get well and reduces the chances that he will have complications?

No Prayer it not like food. You need food in order to live. You don't need prayer in order to live.

 

you're confused.

Prayers are healing the soul, those who pray extensively or on regular basis in a place of worship, feel relieved/refreshed after prayers. Different religions, different things, but when one prays, it asks for something. Most of the time, that something is a goal one is trying to achieve hence adding it to the way the individual performs during the course of his/her day to achieve it finally.

Setting a goal is not the answer, thinking of the goal and thinking that you can overcome the obstacles and asking the "Gods" for help, will help thee through the course of their journey.

Most of this studies are garbage.

 

Is the "soul" constantly sick that it needs "healing"?

Also those to medidate, or run a marathon, or go to the gym.

not always, most of the time people pray because: people just pray.

You lost me on this one.

So you agree that the prayer itself does not help, just its positive psychological effect might help?

The study I described proves that praying for somebody certainly does not improve his chances to survive a bypass operation.
At best, it won't make things worse, but it probably do make things worse.

 

is your day always full of sunshine? there's always something that makes us grind our teeth. In some religions, thinking harm of somebody is sin, hence prayers for "forgiveness"

can also be a stressful day at work.

what's the harm? it becomes routine after a while.. just like any other repetitive thing in the course of the day

It's a psychological thing

I'm not saying that it doesn't help; what's the point of sighing?
It is a psychological thing, to some great extent, yes.

no comment!

 

So, everything is clear. I didn't say praying is harmful. All I said that in this specific case, it might be harmful. Another study can easily clarify that.

All I said is that prayers don't help. That is the message of my thread, and I also backed it by a simple, straightfoward scientific experiment, which kinda makes it from just my opinion to a scientific truth.

 

Prayer can be fatal when one forgoes medical treatment in hopes that god will cure them.

 

It can be more fatal if the person has strong religious beliefs against medical methods, i.e. refusing blood transfusion, etc.

 

The shittiest thing is organ transplant. I don't know how it is with Christianity and Islam, but in Judaism they believe that the body will someday raise from the dead, and at that day it could use its organs. So the orthodox just don't donate organs, but are the first to stand in line when a donation is needed....
http://www.agudatadi.org.il/ Israeli organization for promoting willingness to donate organs.
I am also active in another organization which say: "If you don't donate organs ---> you don't get them if you need!"

 

I'm a man of science myself but I've seen cases where people got healed"by the power of the prayer". Like I say before it's all mental.....if one includes disease in their prayer than yes, one will suffer. As instead, if one thinks of seeing themselves get better and praying for a healthy day, then yes, they will get better. Is not much of how much God can do for them, it's subconsciously what they are doing to themselves.

It shifts from religious to mental and vice-versa.