I have previously written about the STEP study led by Herbert Benson in 2006, which demonstrated that intercessory prayer had no effect on heart patients except as a placebo effect—that is, that the patients responded to knowing that someone was praying for them. These results indicated that it is more likely for prayer to have a placebo effect rather than to be God performing a miracle. This study investigated what could be called “distant intercessory prayer.”
The placebo effect can be especially strong if the person who is praying for you is right next to you, even placing his or her hands on you. Another study was published, in 2009, which appears to have demonstrated a strong placebo effect of “proximal intercessory prayer.” We can conclude from these two studies that prayer works—not because of miracles but because of strong psychological suggestion. Proximal prayer, according to the 2009 study, is more effective than weaker forms of suggestion such as hypnosis.
I have shortened an Indiana University press release on this study:
Findings reported in a new international study of healing prayer suggest that prayer for another person's healing just might help—especially if the one praying is physically near the person being prayed for.
Candy Gunther Brown, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, led the study of "proximal intercessory prayer" for healing. It was published in the September 2010 issue of the Southern Medical Journal. The study, titled "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Proximal Intercessory Prayer (STEPP) on Auditory and Visual Impairments in Rural Mozambique," measured surprising improvements in vision and hearing in economically disadvantaged areas where eyeglasses and hearing aids are not readily available.
"We chose to investigate 'proximal' prayer because that is how a lot of prayer for healing is actually practiced by Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians around the world," Brown said. "These constitute the fastest-growing Christian subgroups globally, with some 500 million adherents, and they are among those most likely to pray expectantly for healing." Although pentecostals often pray for their own healing and request distant intercessory prayer, they consider proximal prayer to be particularly efficacious and emphasize the importance of physical proximity and human touch in praying effectively for healing.
Brown and her colleagues studied the activities of the healing groups Iris Ministries and Global Awakening in Mozambique and Brazil because of their reputation as hotspots of specialized prayer for those with hearing and vision impairments. The researchers used an audiometer and vision charts to evaluate 14 rural Mozambican subjects who reported impaired hearing and 11 who reported impaired vision, both before and after the subjects received proximal intercessory prayer (PIP). The study focused on hearing and vision because it is possible to measure them with hearing machines and vision charts, allowing a more direct measure of improvement than simply asking people whether they feel better.
Subjects exhibited improved hearing and vision that was statistically significant after PIP was administered. Two subjects with impaired hearing reduced the threshold at which they could detect sound by 50 decibels. Three subjects had their tested vision improve from 20/400 or worse to 20/80 or better. These improvements are much larger than those typically found in suggestion and hypnosis studies.
Scientific research on intercessory prayer has in recent decades generated a firestorm of controversy, with critics charging that attempts to study the efficacy of prayer are inherently unscientific and should be abandoned because the mechanisms are poorly understood. Several studies have produced contradictory findings.
The title of the current study makes reference to the widely discussed 2006 "STEP" (study of the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer) paper, which concluded that prayer itself had no effect, but certainty of receiving prayer adversely affected health. However, the STEP study, like most previous research on the efficacy of prayer, focused on distant intercessory prayer (DIP) rather than proximal prayer.
The article is available free online at this website: http://journals.lww.com/smajournalonline/toc/2010/09000.
I conclude that, even if religion is “all in our heads,” it can have a practical usefulness.
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