Prayers don't help heart surgery patients

Many - if not most - people believe that prayer will help you through a medical crisis such as heart bypass surgery. If a large group of people outside yourself, your family, and your friends add their prayers, that should be even more helpful, or so such reasoning goes.

Researchers have been trying to prove this and even to measure the effect of prayer. Since 1988, at least two studies have found that third-party prayers bestow benefits, but two others concluded that there are no benefits. These and other studies have been soundly criticized for flaws in both method and outcome. The fuzzy results goaded researchers to conduct the largest and most scientifically rigid investigation to date. It covered 1,802 people who underwent coronary bypass surgery at six different hospitals from Oklahoma City to Boston. The cost was $2.4 million, paid by the John Templeton Foundation and the Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation of Memphis.

In a clear setback for those who believe in the power of prayer, their prayers were not answered. Prayers offered by strangers did not reduce the medical complications of major heart surgery. Not only that, but patients who knew that others were praying for them fared worse than those who did not receive such spiritual support, or who did but were not aware of receiving it.

"We thought that the certainty of knowing about the prayers of outsiders would reduce complications that accompany bypass surgery," notes Jeffrey Dusek, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. "But the results were paradoxical."

Dusek and his colleagues are quick to say that the study results do not challenge the existence of God. Also, the investigators did not try to address such religious questions as the efficacy of one form of prayer over others, whether God answers intercessory prayers, or whether prayers from one religious group work better than prayers from another, according to the Rev. Dean Marek, a chaplain at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Other participants in the study, who include researchers from Harvard Medical School and Harvard affiliates Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston, agree. As do the teams from medical institutions in Oklahoma City, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tenn., and Rochester, Minn.

Some skeptics believe that studying prayer wastes time and money because its reach goes beyond science. Dusek and Marek, scientist and clergyman, disagree. There's enough anecdotal evidence that prayer influences recovery after surgery and in other circumstance to take a scientific look at the results, they say. "Physicians and health-care providers want to understand if prayer can be used as part of medical treatment," Dusek points out. "In this example, could prayer be used in addition to drugs and other treatments to reduce the complications of coronary bypass surgery?"

The answer apparently is "no."