Have a little faith — you'll feel better

The power of prayer
For the last 15 years, more and more scientists have been exploring whether there are concrete health benefits associated with faith and prayer, a challenging (if not impossible) course of study under the best of circumstances. Most difficult: Trying to quantify whether praying for someone — an act the experts refer to as “intercessory prayer” — actually helps the person being prayed for. One major problem is that it’s tough to control the “dose” of prayer that someone is getting (i.e., even if a person is not assigned to a prayed-for group, her family, friends and church congregations could be slipping in a few prayers on the side). Then there is the question of how many prayers constitute a single dose, not to mention how to define a prayer — does anyone really pray the same way? Does it matter if the person praying for someone else isn’t of the same religion? What if the person praying is faking or doesn’t truly have her heart in it — will that affect the outcome? And that’s merely a short list of the potential hurdles.

Which is why only a few of the many intercessory prayer investigations done over the years are considered scientifically sound. One that is, a 2005 study done at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, compared heart patients who were being prayed for to a similar group that wasn’t being prayed for. The end result: no difference in their recovery or survival. A second 2006 study of cardiac bypass patients not only found no benefits for the people being prayed for, but also revealed that folks who knew prayers were being directed their way experienced more health complications than people who weren’t getting prayers. “It simply hasn’t been a very fruitful area of research,” says Harold G. Koenig, M.D., codirector of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University Medical Center. “Then again, the scientific method wasn’t developed to study supernatural phenomena.”

One intercessory prayer study did show positive — and remarkable — effects: In 2001, The Journal of Reproductive Medicine reported that when people prayed for a group of Korean women undergoing fertility treatments (who didn’t know they were being prayed for), the women conceived at twice the rate as those who weren’t receiving any prayers. The findings immediately caused a sensation — and drew criticism. Skeptics questioned the study’s methodology as well as the credentials of one of the study authors, whose degrees were in law and parapsychology. Then the lead author said he’d only consulted on the project months after the study had been done, rather than head it up, which fomented more controversy.

Yet all this doesn’t mean that praying is useless — far from it. Receiving someone else’s prayers may not have tangible benefits, at least in the scientifically quantifiable realm, but a person’s own faith and religious habits can have a profound impact on her own health and emotional well-being. A nine-year study of more than 21,000 adults published in Demography in 1999 found that people who went to religious services more than once a week lived an average of seven years longer than folks who didn’t, results that held up after factors such as smoking and income level were taken out of the equation. In a 28-year study of 5,000-plus people, those who attended some form of religious services at least once a week were about 25 percent less likely to have died than those who didn’t. Research also suggests that regular church attendance is linked with lower blood pressure, less chronic pain, slower cognitive decline in older adults and fewer symptoms of depression, among other benefits. One study even found a link between weekly church attendance and low blood levels of interleukin 6, a protein that, when present in high amounts, can indicate a weakened immune system.

The question is: What causes those salubrious effects? Is God responsible? Or something else? With all due respect to God (assuming He exists), the explanation may be less than supernatural. Dr. Koenig says he believes that people who are part of a religious community are more likely to experience the psychological windfalls of hope and purpose that come from hearing sermons and singing and praying with others. They are also the beneficiaries of added social support — say, having friends who bring groceries or check in during trying times. Those are all clearly life-extending ingredients. “We know that the mind and emotions have an impact on the immune and cardiovascular systems,” Dr. Koenig says. “So it stands to reason that religion and prayer would alter physiology as well. It makes more sense to study those benefits than to try to prove whether (intercessory prayer) works or God exists.”

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