One more thing for Christian Science to worry about (besides the flu)

In a press release from Duke Medical School, doctors confirmed that prayer (being prayed for***) has no significant therapeutic value, though interestingly Therapeutic Touch does. The effect of prayer on patient recovery after surgery has been kicking around with surprising gusto in the medical literature the past few years, in part because of the increased belief on the part of the public and many funding agencies that non material causes (like prayer) should be treated on par with naturalistic, scientific (in the traditional sense) explanations, and in part because of a series of appalling studies that have appeared in the last few years in journals like the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and JAMA (two of many summary articles here and here) that "scientifically prove" the power of praying for others. Despite the fact that the papers supporting the medical role for distant prayer are crap (from a purely methodological and statistical procedure), prayer is getting press.

I'm worried big time, and not because of the practical danger to society if such results are followed.

Its not because I don't think that religious explanations should be evaluated according to a scientific method, though I worry about the negative impact on religion. Its more that from the public perspective there is now scientific evidence to support prayer/intelligent design/what-ever and its starting to affect the way we do science and educate our children. You had better believe this is going to have an economic or, worse, health consequence in the not too distant future.

Even though only one out of every thousand studies supports the use of (distant) prayer as medical treatment, and even though the studies supporting the use of prayer make use of shoddy methodology, there are voices using these studies as evidence against the "he hegemony of naturalistic, scientific ideology" (to quote on IDer I met at the Stanford/Veritas forum in May) and politicians are listening.


***There's actually pretty good evidence that praying on the part of the patient does improve both recovery time and over all well-being.