Does prayer help sick people get better?
I once saw an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies that is actually pertinent to your question. Granny claimed to have a cure for the common cold, which excited Mr. Drysdale to no end. He started backing her in her endevors to market the foul potion, base on testimonials of familiy members that tried the obnoxious concoction. It seems that doctors had told Mr. Drysdale that the best way to get rid of a cold he had was to drink plenty of fluids and get plenty of rest, and the cold should be out of his system in about seven days. When he finally got around to reading the instructions on the bottle of Granny’s Cold Cure, can you guess what it said?
Yup. “Take once a day for a week, drink plenty of water, and stay in bed.”
If you mean does prayer give some people the impression that they’re doing something constructive with their time and so “feel better” about their or their loved-ones predicament (possibly with placebo effects along for the ride), then yes, prayer can help.
I read about a study once that observed the responses of four sample groups:
1.) patients who were told they were being prayed for and who were being prayed for.
2.) Patients who were being told they were being prayed for but were not being prayed for.
3.) Patients who were told they were not being prayed for but secretly were.
4.) Patients who were told they were not being prayed for and were not being prayed for.
Patients who were told they were being prayed for did marginally better than those who were told they were not. Whether they were actually being prayed for made no difference, all that mattered was that they believed it.
I think this shows a placebo effect, and it may also just help psychologically to know that people care enough to pray. It does not show that prayer, per se, has any beneficial effect.
There are a number of philosphical and logical problems with the notion of petitional prayer as well but as a matter of pure science it has not been shown to make the slightest difference.
The effects of prayer have been shown to be so small that they’re within the realm of statistical variation. At least one study has shown that intercessory prayer makes people get worse.
A few years ago a study published in an obscure medical journal created a stir when it purported to show a significant effect from prayer- you can probably find more about it on www.csicop.org. The problem was that all of the criteria for the patient getting well were tied together, so that the random chance of a patient getting an infection was counted over and over again under different names.
Huey Lewis and the News believed in it.
Oh wait. . . that was the power of love. Never mind.
Norman Vincent Peale covered it pretty well in “The Power of Positive Thinking”. Attitude counts for a lot. Not for everything, but for a lot.
I think it does, handsomeharold, but I think it helps if the sick person believes it will help them, too.
I don’t think there’s much point in praying over someone if they’re going “this isn’t gonna work” the whole time.
I’m a Christian so I can only speak from that perspective but IIRC, in the Bible Jesus never healed anyone who didn’t believe He could heal them.
I know execeptions, though, of people who have been healed who didn’t even believe in God, and I’m sure you could name off exceptions too.
There’s nothing “exceptional” about it. belief in God has no statistical correlation with one’s chances of getting healed. Atheists and Devil worshippers have the same chance of getting better as a Born Again Christian.
Btw, on an anecdotal basis, prayers to Krishna or Hanuman the Monkey God work just as well as prayers to Jesus. It doesn’t actually matter what you pray to. This is more indication that any perceived benefit from prayer is a placebo effect at best.
Meditation helps, too.
I pray to the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Works, too. 
Posted by Musicat:
If the unicorn is invisible, how do you know it’s pink? Or is that where faith comes into it?
I won’t discount the power of prayer. But, I ignore any and all experiments to demonstrate it, or the lack of it. Christians are forbidden from experimenting on God – or from praying just to see if it will work. That’s not what prayer is.
“Words without thoughts never to heaven go” – how could an experiment work? What motivation could the pray-er have for praying for one group and not for another group, other than to see what will happen? This is not a sincere prayer since the only reason for praying for the one group but not the other is experimental. The pray-er doesn’t sincerely desire the healing of the group prayed for, in this case. It’s pointless.
Nice circular reasoning there, masonite. However, what Dio mentioned was a study. I don’t know about the specifics of that particular study, but it is very possible to set up a study that meets your criteria. All one has to do is find patients who are being prayed for, regardless of the study, and then observe the outcomes.
I read this in a forum once, copied it, and pasted it to a file so I would have it as a reminder.
Author unknown:
So let us consider prayers of supplication. Ending world hunger, a most admirable request, has yet to become a reality, in spite of countless prayers. So people are encouraged to pray, instead, for more easily achieved goals, like having Aunt Helen get over her cold soon, or for the kids to do well in school, or whatever. Football players actually get on their knees and thank God for touchdowns. In a world that contains starvation, disease, murder, and rape, such mundane considerations trivialize the role of a supposedly omnipotent god.
For every “miraculous” recovery by a seriously ill person that is attributed to God, there is a seriously ill person who is prayed for but dies anyway. Soldiers are prayed for and die, and soldiers are not prayed for but live. Bad things happen to good, prayed-for people, bad things happen to bad people, good things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. In other words, the laws of probabilities are quite clearly in control here.
I think that pretty much sums it up for me.
You dare to doubt the existance of the Invisible Pink Unicorn’s Invisibly Glourious Pink-ness?
Heretic.
handsomeharold – we’ve covered this, you and I. The facts don’t change just because they don’t fit into your worldview.
The Invisble Unicorn is, always has been and always will be purple, not pink. I know because she told me.
I googled the crap out of it but I couldn’t find a cite for that study that I read about. Here is the SD Staff Report on intercessory prayer which references a similar study done by Skeptic Magazine.
No, the healing power of prayer is well known.
Here is an article:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1999/10/28/deleted/main68441.shtml
What is incredible is that the patients were prayed for without their knowledge and still got better quicker.
Hmmm, got any more souces for this phenomenon? - a study involving only one thousand cases and only showing about 10% effectiveness sounds like the sort of thing that might turn out to be a statistical blip.