Testing the power of prayer.....or simple fakery????

Bingo!!!

Actually, there is "some" data suggesting the mind can help out the body subconciously. You can call it prayer, wishing or something similar, but it's still mind over body. It could be the placebo effect rearing its ugly head, or it could be just a statistial anomoly, we won't know because they didn't post their data.

Either way, a 100% difference is extremely hard for me to swallow, espically considering modern medicine is not 100% effective. In fact, where they don;t list their statistics (not saying they didn't do it properly, but that I can't make a rational judgement without seeing their evidence.) They could have concluded that 1/1000 worked without prayer and that 2/1000 worked with prayer. It's still correct with the numbers they present, but not what the intended focus of the article is.

Until the data is shown I'm skeptical, but the fact that they were receiving federal money, and also that they are corrupt, tends to lead me down the BS path.

And the control group. You MUST have a control to measure it against or there is no findings of a change in either direction. Which also brings up a lot of other mitigating factors.

What constitutes 'prayer'? Did they actually say something like, 'Please help Mary Smith of 10 Main Street, Babyfree Missouri to fall pregnant"? Or was it a bit more vague, "Increase the chances of this group of women to conceive".

Did just one person pray just once? Or did a congregation do so for months on end? Did they also give a listing to a Muslim or Hindi group for such an intervention and cross-check the results?

Were there women selected who were not prayed for, but TOLD they were? What was the hit-rate for them?


And the kicker for me. Obviously the women in the survey (I can't describe it as an experiment) were identified as being 'fertility-challenged'. WHAT ELSE WERE THEY DOING to have a baby? They could have all been undertaking any number of other treatments to correct the condition and a finding of an increase in the rate of conceptions amongst such a group would hardly be 'miraculous'.

Good observation, Stilly. No, one may not call it an experiment, because as you mentioned, the control group is THE thing in any scientific thesis.

That's one reason that I don't do polls, even here on A2K.

Sounds as though this thread has gotten on the right track now.

The placebo effect has a rather nice head, though, actually -- it is being recognized more and more that if it has an effect, it has an effect. If giving people a little pink sugar pill makes them feel better, why not give them a little pink sugar pill? (Not exclusively, of course, but why NOT?)

I mentioned recently some study (a real one with a control group and everything) that showed that just being cared for by a professional -- being physically checked, listened to, and given a prescription/ possible solution to the problem -- can all by itself make people feel better.

The effectiveness of the "treatment" may depend on the bias of the observer as well.

Chiropractors claim that their treatments work because 80% of their patients get better.

The percentage of people who get better with no intervention? 80%