Prayers for health do not cure

Prayers for health may be important for the mental balance of the worshipper, but it was not possible to prove their influence on the outcome of the patient's treatment.Alexey Timoshenko, GZT.ru
Sociologist Wendy Cage from Brandis University (USA, Massachusetts) compared the results of 18 different studies of the effect of prayers for health on the patient's condition.

Her conclusion states that scientists have not been able to detect any influence. Reliable evidence, which would have been recognized by scientists and confirmed in subsequent experiments, was not obtained from 1965 to 2006.

There is no result, but there is a benefit

Cage, who has used data already collected by other scientists, does not consider numerous attempts to confirm the influence of prayers useless. According to her, such studies at least allow us to trace how the ideas of doctors and sociologists about religion have evolved.

In particular, she found that the first attempts at research in the 1960s were devoted to prayers read about the health of their loved ones by Protestants (the most common branch of Christianity among the white population of the United States). Later, Jews, Buddhists and other confessions came to the attention of scientists. This indicates a greater recognition of non-traditional religious movements for the United States in recent decades: scientists, among others, have begun to reckon with their presence.

How to check the influence of prayers?

The researcher says that studying the influence of prayers for the health of the patient is fraught with a number of difficulties. She draws attention to several problems. Firstly, it is difficult to prove that no one prayed for the patients in the control group. Secondly, it is not entirely clear how to associate the number of prayers with the magnitude of the effect: different religious denominations describe different requirements for such rituals.

All this makes it difficult to confidently interpret the results of the study. Such uncertainty, as noted in the press release of the university, even leads to the fact that in recent years scientists have increasingly ceased to consider the study of prayers a worthy occupation. British and American doctors, who in early 2009 analyzed data on more than 7.5 thousand patients, included the following words in the abstract of their article: "We do not believe that further work in this direction makes sense, and we would prefer to spend resources on studying other medical issues in the future."

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru/19.06.2009