Current mood:

cynical

Does prayer work?
So, out of curiosity and perhaps a smidge of boredom I turned on the program about Does Prayer Work? tonight. And my first though is how on earth did this guy ever become a doctor. At what point did any kind of scientific method enter into this? Ok, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself and you didn't read the synopsis. The premise was that of a heart surgeon who wanted to test whether prayer made people get better. So they got patients with a low expectation of survival (33% mortality rate I believe) to take part in their study. Not telling them or the patient whether they were being prayed for. So, how were they planning to isolate the effects of different religions, the personal faith of the person or anything? Then halfway through the study (they wanted 750 people to get enough data) they decide to change it and have prayer groups praying for the people praying. Interesting to see the reaction of the various religious people. The Bishop of Durham made the very salient point that God is not like a machine where you put a coin in the slot and get better. You can't make him prove he exists. Now I'm agnostic bordering on atheist but I have to admire the way he put his view across. Less impressive was the Christian fundamentalist who was interviewed at the start who was convinced there would be a huge difference from prayer but outraged that this wasn't a bake off between the religions.

Anyways, the outcome was no statistical difference. But there were some "anomalies" when they had people praying for the people praying. Now, given that this was over the course of 10 years you might expect the treatment of patients to have come on in the meantime so perhaps those treated at the end had a better chance of survival. But, no, they now want to do another study.

Now, you may think this a rant against religion. But I agree with the Bishop of Durham - it wouldn't have worked whatever your religious viewpoint. My rant is against the muppetry of those doing these tests or trying to read meaning into the random statistics at the end. Science is definitely the loser here.