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Fri 28 Sep, 2007 09:30 pm
This is an excerpt from Chapter Nine 'Humility' of a book I'm reading called "The Power of Empathy" by Arthur P. Ciaramicoli.
I never previously knew that any research at all had been done into prayer, and no I haven't gone out and purchased healing words to read it myself. I thought I'd post it as an interesting article that I came across.
Quote:In his book Healing Words, Larry Dossey, M.D., cites hundreds of studies showing that loving, empathic thoughts and prayers can have a powerful, positive influence on health and healing-not just in humans but also in bacteria, rats, and mice. In one experiment sixty subjects with no known healing abilities were able to slow and speed up the growth of bacteria cultures. In a series of twento-one experiments with mice recovering from anathesia, nineteen studies showed "highly significant" results, with the "prayed for" mice enjoying faster recovery.
Hmm, sounds like utter crock to me...
We should definitely read the abstracts for the studies cited in 'healing words' before we begin to take this article seriously.
Here's a good example of where such thinking (and believing) takes us.
Town Saved by the Lord Jesus says Louisiana Prosecutor
Joe(Other minister asks "Whose Jesus is He anyway?)Nation
In (just to hand) contra- indicative research my prayers about the livelihood of this thread remained unanswered.
'twento-one'
'anathesia'
'highly significant' is the clincher because a result is either significant or it is not significant from a mathematical statistics standpoint
epenthesis, you've gone straight for the ad hominems. Spelling mistakes don't really matter, do they. And your last point is wrong. Results can be significant at different levels. For example, a value which is significant at p<0.01 could be considered more "highly significant" than a value which is only significant at p<0.05.
Not that I want to defend the content of the article.
Well I'm glad people are questioning the authenticity. After all it doesn't cite the original studies, which is a shame.
That said - Joe Nation - an example of prayer that effects mice and bacteria is hardly comparative to saying "Jesus is responsible". At least, I haven't met a Christian mouse yet, nor any particularly religious one. And prayer doesn't have to involve religion (nor is such suggested in the article)
Epenthesis - I did type the article out, seeing as it came from the book. I'll happily admit I didn't check for spelling mistakes.
vikorr wrote:And prayer doesn't have to involve religion (nor is such suggested in the article)
Well, does the article provide any hypothesis whatsoever? What is prayer in this context then? Positive vibes?
To whence is the prayer directed? The mousey brains or souls?
Or is there some other undetermined and unnamed power that is derived solely (no pun intended) from the words and sounds of the prayer itself?
Like a Buddhist Prayer Wheel in motion... .
This from 2006:
Long Awaited Study Questions the Power of Prayer
Not the good news some were praying for.
Joe(Don't pray for me. I get performance anxiety.)Nation
A much more comparable article
I decided to look on the net under re Healing Words, and found this article
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_n4_v18/ai_16139332
Quote:Dossey concurs with the "many researchers [who] feel it is easier to study the effects of prayer in simple, nonhuman living systems [emphasis in original]. Prayer experiments in simpler life forms are much less ambiguous, involve fewer variables, and are easier to interpret." He cites many "consistent, replicable, and robust" experiments from the parapsychological literature,
I did also find this review :
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/311/7013/1174
Quote:The first third of Healing Words reminds us of the divinity that underlies every good approach to healing. But the remainder of the book takes two unfortunate turns. Firstly, Dossey goes off into convoluted new-age jargon, talking of the power of "non-local events" in healing. He seems to contradict his initial thesis that some greater power holds the truth to what is right and that it is our job to hope that "Thy will be done."
Secondly, he spends much of the second half of the book justifying prayer by doing an informal review of the scientific literature, from cell and animal studies all the way to specific clinical outcomes. In other words, he tries to use the scientific method to prove what he says initially cannot be proved.
That's only part of the review of course.
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