real life wrote:
To call this a scientific test is ludicrous.
Were all of the sick who are compared with one another at the same degree of illness? Obviously not, some were much worse off at the beginning than others so you are not starting off with an equivalence in your test subjects.
Did each one of them undergo exactly the same medical procedures, take exactly the same medicines, and follow the same regimen as regards diet, exercise, cessation of smoking, etc. Again obviously not. Probably not two of them out of hundeds were alike.
Did each of the persons praying receive the same instructions regarding how to pray for the sick? Obviously not, they were from diverse religious groups and probably have a wide variance as to what is believed regarding prayer and specifically prayer for seriously ill persons, and each one followed their own manner of prayer.
They were not told to pray all in the same way, nor were they standardized in any manner.
So on both sides of the equation -- the sick and the pray-er --- you probably don't have any two alike, no standardization before or during the test, just the attempt afterward to draw a conclusion based on a faulty method.
You're gonna call this a 'scientific' test?
The new $2.4 million study, funded primarily by the John Templeton Foundation, was designed to overcome some of those shortcomings. Dusek and his colleagues divided 1,802 bypass patients at six hospitals into three groups. Two groups were uncertain whether they would be the subject of prayers. The third was told they would definitely be prayed for.
The researchers recruited two Catholic groups and one Protestant group to pray "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for 14 days for each patient, beginning the night before the surgery, using the patient's first name and the first initial of the last name.
Over the next month, the two groups that were uncertain whether they were the subject of prayers fared virtually the same, with about 52 percent of patients experiencing complications regardless of whether they were the subject of prayers.
Surprisingly, 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for experienced complications.
Because the most common complication was an irregular heartbeat, researchers speculated that knowing they were chosen to receive prayers may have inadvertently put the patients under increased stress
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/30/AR2006033000902.html
discussion
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=72071&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
Maybe the Catholics tilt their heads a different way from the Protestants.
P
