Intercessory Prayer for the Alleviation of Ill Health
📄 Original study ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Can strangers praying for you actually help you heal? A team of researchers conducted the most rigorous review possible — a Cochrane review, which is basically the Supreme Court of medical evidence — pulling together 10 randomized trials with over 7,600 patients. The verdict? Prayer made essentially zero difference to whether people died, got better, or ended up back in the hospital. Out of 33 specific health outcomes examined, only 3 slightly favored the prayer groups, but that's roughly what you'd expect from random chance when you run that many comparisons. Here's the truly eyebrow-raising twist: patients who knew they were being prayed for actually did worse, experiencing 15% more complications. The researchers' final recommendation was blunt — don't bother running more trials on this.
Links
Related Papers
Meta Analyzes
- Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population — Byrd, Randolph C (1988)
- A Randomized, Controlled Trial of the Effects of Remote, Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients Admitted to the Coronary Care Unit — Harris, William S (1999)
- Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in Cardiac Bypass Patients: A Multicenter Randomized Trial of Uncertainty and Certainty of Receiving Intercessory Prayer — Benson, Herbert (2006)
- Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial — Leibovici, Leonard (2001)
Companion
More in Healing
Effects of Intentionally-Treated Water on Cell Migration of Human Glioblastoma Cells
Water, Wine and the Sacred, An Anthropological View of Substances Altered by Intentioned Awareness, Including Objective and Aesthetic Effects
Transcriptional Changes in Cancer Cells Induced by Exposure to a Healing Method
Infrared Spectra Alteration in Water Proximate to the Palms of Therapeutic Practitioners
Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: Going Beyond Even Meta-Analysis of Distant Intention Effects
📋 Cite this paper
Roberts, Leanne, Ahmed, Irshad, Davison, Andrew (2009). Intercessory Prayer for the Alleviation of Ill Health. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD000368.pub3
@article{roberts_2009_intercessory_prayer_cochrane,
title = {Intercessory Prayer for the Alleviation of Ill Health},
author = {Roberts, Leanne and Ahmed, Irshad and Davison, Andrew},
year = {2009},
journal = {Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews},
doi = {10.1002/14651858.CD000368.pub3},
}