Spiritual healing and distant healing actually work

Well well, that certainly looks like an impressive list of studies. Let's take it apart. I'll start with the last one first. The Targ study: "Shortly after Dr. Targ's death, her methods came under attack. An article in Wired magazine charged that she and her co-authors had massaged their data on AIDS to make the effects of prayer look better than they were. Officials at California Pacific conducted an investigation of the study and concluded that the data had not been manipulated. Dr. John Astin, who is running the second AIDS study, said the biggest weakness of Dr. Targ's first trial was that it was too small to be conclusive." and "But in a letter defending the study, the hospital's director of research also acknowledged that he could not tell for sure from the original medical records which patients had been prayed for and which had not been. 'Each subject's name, age and date of birth were blinded with what appears to be a black crayon,' he wrote." Soooo basically we have a study that has a small enough control group that positive results can appear to be statistically significant when they may not be, which is further marred by the fact that records were probably altered or tampered with. If I flipped a coin ten times and it came up heads 6 times, and then changed my data so it said it came up heads 7 times, yeah, that might look convincing and I could even say hey, I ran a study and heads comes up more than tails, it must be true! But I didn't do enough trials to show that in the long run with enough flips, heads and tails will tend to even themselves out. And if you think I oversimplify, this study had 40 people. So if by freak chance one member of the control group died and everyone else did the same, it would appear that prayer increases your chances of survival by 5%. Size matters when conducting scientific research. So that's one bit of evidence shot down. Here's a critique: http://www.skepdic.com... Now, as for the other 2 studies: Both are essentially the same study replicated at different hospitals, so I can deal with them as one. The essential problems in this study were several. I have to split a little here. The first one you mentioned, the Byrd study, made a 2 big flaws that even I can see, I not being a statistician or a doctor. One is that the control and prayer groups, while pronounced equal by Byrd, were in fact very different. First, the median age of the control group was 2 years higher than that of the prayer group, which makes a big difference with heart disease. Next, the prayer group contained both a greater number and a higher percentage of women than the control, which is significant because women are less prone to heart conditions than men. Third, the control group had a greater percentage of prior acute MCI's (heart attacks), also a major factor in treatment, as well as a higher percentage of unstable angina, cardiomyopathy, and supraventricular tachyarrhythmia (really fast irregular heartbeat). Basically the prayer group was healthier to begin with, and although I'm not going to go down the list for the Harris study, it's a similar story. Next big mistake in these studies was the analysis. Now, when you do a study, you generally test for one thing, for example a hypothesis might be "prayer reduces the number and severity of heart attacks." But these studies didn't do that. Basically they ran the study and then cherry picked the categories that they used to quantify how prayer was better. Now, there is a technique called meta analysis in which you analyze data collected in previous studies that show a result that the study wasn't searching for. For example, a study that sought to find out whether a new drug lowered blood pressure might have found no result, and reported such. But analyzing the data, one might find that those on the drug had their cholesterol lowered significantly, and a meta analyzer might point this out. However, if the study makers had done a study to assess blood pressure, found no result, but looked and found the cholesterol correlation, it would be intellectually dishonest of them to act as though the entire study was based on finding out whether the drug lowered cholesterol. Such is the case here; there was no specific criterion established for the efficacy of prayer other than the rating of Good, Intermediate, or Bad. The authors of the studies simply took whatever criterion they chose to support their theories. Another death blow to the studies was that while they were double blind at the outset, meta analysis revealed the identities of the patients to the analyzers (who happened to be the same doctors that fervently believe in the efficacy of prayer) either directly or through the fact that with so few patients in the trial, a doctor could easily recognize most of them. In fact, the people behind the Harris study could not duplicate Byrd's results using Byrd's scoring system, which should have worked if in fact Byrd's scoring system was not based entirely on manipulation of data. Now, here's a genuine, double blind, large, independently non-meta analyzed study. Run by the Mayo Clinic. Now, this will at first sound like an appeal to authority, but in fact it is not. The Mayo Clinic is basically one of the best medical centers in the world. When they run a study, it is almost guaranteed to be well run. Guess what this study found? That's right, absolutely no correlation between prayer and healing. http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.com... So here's my summary. You've presented 3 studies. One is so severely flawed that it cannot be at all counted. The other two are also extremely flawed in that they are meta analyzed rather than attempting to find a specific result. I've presented two studies that between them have more than double the total number of patients in your studies. They are well controlled, triple blind (meaning even the data analyzer does not initially know what group a given patient was in), and run by some of the best research institutions in the country. One was even funded by a religion supporting institution, the Templeton Foundation. And I didn't even include the MANTRA studies run by Duke, which also showed no evidence of the efficacy of prayer. In briefer summary: Professional, well done studies show no result, while studies run and analyzed by people with a strong religious bias show a pro-religion view. Does this mean that only religious study makers can find prayer's effects, or that religious study makers are manipulating data to create such an effect? I leave it to the voters to decide.