Not long ago, Natural Health celebrated its 30th anniversary. This is a magazine on, generally, alternative healthcare. I've been reading this publication for seven or eight of those thirty years, and count it among my favorites. And to address my fellow skeptics out there, I'll say this: Yes, some alternative treatments are crap. Others, however, are not. I'll leave it at that.
Anyway, one of the things they did in this anniversary issue was list the thirty most influential/important figures in a number of health related fields. One of these categories was "Teachers," which they described as "those who taught us how to know our bodies and our selves." Among the great "teachers" listed were such luminaries as Mark Blumenthal, who was a pioneer in herbal therapy in America. Also, Mollie Katzen, whose The Moosewood Cookbook was on the forefront of modern vegetarian cooking. Dean Ornish, M.D., is also in this list, and rightfully so. His low fat vegetarian diet is amazing in treating, even reversing, advanced heart disease. But among these admirable folks was also listed Larry Dossey, M.D. His claim to fame is his bestseller from 1993, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine.
Now, as anyone knows who's looked into the "research" on this topic, there is some evidence that prayer actually does work on a limited basis. A person who uses prayer may recover more quickly. It's kinda hard to tell, really. But in general, it seems to be equivalent to maintaining a positive outlook for oneself being better than holding a negative outlook. Makes sense, really.
But no reputable studies have ever shown that intercessory prayer does a damn thing. In other words, praying for someone else's recovery won't make a bit of difference.
Dossey thinks otherwise, and his book talks of some 130 studies done around the world on prayer. What he doesn't explain, however, is that these studies are all seriously flawed.
In science, we like to use controlled double-blind studies in order to really assess whether something is effective, or just the result of the placebo effect. The problem is, with prayer it's utterly impossible to engage in this kind of study, on many levels. It is impossible to determine that prayer is not being done for those in the control group, for example. It is also impossible to measure the "dosage" of prayer. It isn't like penicillin, after all.
These reasons, and a host of others, make any study on the effects of prayer a complete joke. And naturally, I wrote to Natural Health expressing the above sentiments. Their reply? They told me their list was, of course, subjective, and that many people might disagree with their assessments.
Yes, that's true. It's all subjective, and not one of us is without bias. But it's one thing to have a subjective list of "favorites." It's quite another to grant some semblance of credibility to something as completely flawed as the studies on prayer.
It's annoying enough for us rationalists to deal with morons who think prayer actually works. We don't need the media feeding these fairy tales to the public.
