Cardiac patients get prayer; health value questioned
Posted on Tuesday, April 4, 2006
The Rev. Michael Barnes has seen terminally ill patients who were healed and attributed their cure to others' prayers. He also has seen patients die who were prayed for just as fervently.
"As a chaplain, I try to encourage people to know that they are not suffering alone, and that God is always with them,"said Barnes, who works with St. Vincent Health System in Little Rock. "And I'm not God. Whatever God decides to do is up to God."
A study on prayer that will appear today in the American Heart Journal offers similarly mixed results. In the study - the largest yet of its kind - researchers found that having strangers pray for patients undergoing heart bypass surgery had no impact on their recovery. Indeed, the study showed those who knew they were being prayed for had the highest rate of complications.
At least five earlier studies dealing with cardiac patients and the effects of others' prayers had been similarly inconclusive, but the researchers of the American Heart Journal study said those studies had methodological flaws.
This most recent $ 2. 4 million study was financed by Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis - one of six hospitals that participated in the study - and the West Conshohocken, Pa.-based John Templeton Foundation, which supports research into science and spirituality.
The study divided about 1, 800 cardiac patients into three groups: those who were told someone would pray for them; those who were told someone might or might not pray for them and received no prayers; and those who were told someone might or might not pray for them and got prayer.
Two Catholic monasteries and a Protestant group prayed for "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications"for specific patients identified by their first name and the initial for their last name. The prayers began on the night before surgery and continued for two weeks. About 65 percent of the 1, 800 patients said they believed in prayer, and researchers did not seek to prevent the patients from having loved ones pray for them.
About 52 percent of the 604 patients who got prayer but were uncertain of receiving it had complications, while 51 percent of the 597 who weren't prayed for did. By comparison, about 59 percent of the 601 patients who were told they were being prayed for had complications.
The complications were minor and related to elevated stress. The study's investigators speculated that perhaps the knowledge that someone was praying for them might have added to some patients' stress level by giving them performance anxiety or making them think they were so sick they needed the extra prayer.
"What we have here are results that demand more study,"said Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School, one of the study's lead investigators.
Such results don't surprise Dr. Andy Henry, who works with the Little Rock Cardiology Clinic.
Henry said he has seen too many miracles in his 20-year cardiology practice not to believe that God intervenes in people's lives, but no one can know when God will act and God won't.
"You can't put God to the test,"said Henry, a member of Fellowship Bible Church in west Little Rock. "God answers prayers in ways sometimes that we don't anticipate. God is more interested in the spiritual heart than the physical heart."
He and other critics of the study said such prayer research is flawed because it seeks to prove the unprovable.
"In order for someone to have faith in Almighty God, you don't question if it works or not,"said Rabbi Martin Applebaum of Congregation Agudath Achim in Little Rock. "You assume that your prayer is working or will work or else you don't pray to him."
Barnes said he thinks science and religion can be compatible, but they are "different animals."
"At least from a social justice standpoint, I would think the money [for such studies ] might be used in more realistic and constructive ways,"he said.
But even if they can't illuminate God's will, such studies offer some insight, said the Rev. Emil Turner, executive director of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, which is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.
"I don't see this as something that's testing God,"he said. "I think it's someone's attempt to quantify what, anecdotally, Americans have come to believe - that prayer is a valuable thing."
The Rev. John Atchison, pastor of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Springdale, said a prayer study, regardless of its results, is likely to encourage more people to pray.
Ultimately, Barnes, the chaplain, stressed that prayers should serve a greater purpose than just a chance to ask for help for oneself or others. "Prayer is done to carry out a relationship with God, and I don't carry on a relationship with my friends or with my wife simply so that I can get things,"he said. "I carry on that relationship because it's a relationship based on love."
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