blogfaced.com

leave it to the new york times - i was notified of an article which summarized the conclusions of a recent study - “the most scientifically rigorous investigation of whether prayer can heal illness.” oh yeah, it gets better.

not only did the 2 bypass surgery groups (one receiving prayers, the other not) experience similar rates of post-op complications (the measure of whether or not prayer was effective), but within the group of patients receiving prayer, those whom were told they were being prayed for experienced increased rates of complications - this was shown by some sweet bar graphs in the actual paper. the reasoning? “perhaps from expectations the prayers created.” moral of the story: don’t pray for me you’re stressing me out.

i feel sorry for the group that didn’t get prayed for at all - i don’t know how they decided which patients were to get prayers. maybe that was the “scientifically rigorous” part of the study - “by systematically varying the height and rotation of a common two-sided monetary unit, we were able to conclusively arrive at an unbias way for dividing up patients into the two groups”

and of course there are NO variables in a prayer study. the research didn’t even set up the proper control experiments - like what about having groups where people prayed that the patients DID get complications, or groups where people tried to undo the prayers. or pray for george mason to win the ncaa tournament in addition to praying to relieve complications of some random patient.

and what about the people who prayed? supposedly they were members from local parishes who didn’t even know the patients. what if family members were praying for the patients who were supposed to be in the non-praying group?

what if the people praying for the patients prayed wrong? like they messed up a name?

conclusions? “the role of awareness of prayer should be studied further.” well shit. translation: after countless discussions with pretty much NOT GOD, we have no idea what the crap is going on with this whole “prayer thing.” at least whenever someone starts complaining to me about their money going into basic science research, i can cite this bullshit. and for future reference, i don’t think using science to prove god exists really works - i mean, that’s like proving intelligent design with natural selection. finally, the researchers didn’t even put GOD down as the primary author. the bible belt is going to have something to say about that.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 7:10 pm and is filed under current events, the scoreboard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.