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Power of prayer found wanting in hospital trial
By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent
(Filed: 15/10/2003)The biggest scientific experiment on prayer has failed to find any evidence that it helps to heal the sick.
Doctors in the United States will today disclose that heart patients who were prayed for by groups of strangers recovered from surgery at the same rate as those who were not.
The three-year study, led by cardiologists from Duke University Medical Centre in North Carolina, involved 750 patients in nine hospitals and 12 prayer groups around the world, from Christians in Manchester to Buddhists in Nepal.
Earlier, less extensive, research suggested prayer could have a measurably beneficial effect.
But the experiment, which will be detailed in a BBC2 Everyman documentary to be broadcast next week, was criticised as crude by Church leaders. The Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Tom Wright, said: "Prayer is not a penny-in-the-slot machine. You can't just put in a coin and get out a chocolate.
"This is like setting an exam for God to see if God will pass it or not."
He said both the Old and New Testaments said "very clearly" that you must not put God to the test. The new research, dubbed the Mantra project, was led by Dr Mitch Krucoff, a cardiologist, whose pilot studies had led him to believe that prayer could have measurably beneficial effects.
Over three years, 750 patients awaiting angioplasty, a procedure to clear obstructions from their arteries, were recruited for the experiment.
Names selected at random by a computer were sent to the 12 prayer groups, who began praying immediately for their recovery. Neither the hospital staff nor the patients and their relatives knew who was being prayed for.
The prayer groups included American Christian mothers, nuns in a Carmelite convent in Baltimore, Sufi Muslims, Buddhist monks in Nepal and English doctors and medical students in Manchester. Prayers were even e-mailed to Jerusalem and placed in the Wailing Wall.
An analysis of the results found that there were no significant differences in the recovery and health of the patients who were prayed for and those who were not.
The Rev Leslie Francis, professor of practical theology at the University of Wales, said two major studies, in 1988 and 1999, had found that prayer had a beneficial effect.
"In medical research one expects divergent results, so it is premature to affirm or dismiss the power of prayer in healing," he said. "But if the pharmaceutical industry was getting these sorts of results they would be investing a great of money in research."
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Ignored One.