Faith Healing is Effective

In the opening salvo my opponent has shifted the goal post around, arguing that “coupled with sound medical science, faith healing can aid in a patient's recovery.” This is not at all the topic of this debate and all of his discussion is on the topic of positive thinking and its effect on recovery. My opponent may have a differing idea of what faith healing is, but the topic is how effective it is in attaining the goal of healing a patient in lieu of medical treatment, not in parallel. Examples of the claims of Faith Healing:“A woman with MS came into the Bethel Healing Rooms Saturday morning, October 31. She was only able to move one arm and a few fingers. After receiving fifteen minutes of prayer, she was dancing around praising Jesus, pushing her own wheelchair!” [1]“A woman in Huntington Beach had her left lung removed over 30 yrs ago. She was not able to breathe deep or hold her breath. After receiving prayer she started taking deep breaths and holding her breath! She also had a broken bone in her hand. When God touched her all the pain left. Jesus is ALIVE today!!” [2]These are clearly not discussions about people who have been going to their doctors for decades with ailments that are already in remission and healing, they are miracle stories of people with MS, AIDS, Scoliosis, Vision problems, and a heap of further amazing claims. These people are claiming that going to this church and being prayed for is enough to make even the most persistent of problems become painless and or non-existent.The question is, can someone actually anticipate this to be the case. Clearly there are morally offensive topics that are not being broached (why does god not heal amputees – He does, well actually no he doesn’t but that doesn’t stop us from trying! [3][6]; why does god heal these people when so many more are suffering elsewhere?) Many of the concepts involved in the process of being a faith healer were exposed in a recent piece by Derren Brown – Miracles for Sale [4], and it is quite close to what I had expected. People are “healed” with the catch 22 that if they don’t get healed they have sin within their lives, or they have not accepted Jesus or something like “you’ll never see them grow if you don’t start praying for them.” [3] Unfortunately only one case of an amputee being healed has ever been documented, but it was shown to be dubious at best. [5]What happens when healings are studied?In the comments an interesting sentiment was shared, regarding science reaching into the faith healing ministries. There is a Non-Overlapping Magisteria position that is pushed occasionally that seems to be agreed to by the faithful, but there is a problem. Faith healing is supposed to have an effect within reality – people who were sick previously are no longer sick. They will have to have been sick previously and being prayed over, accepting Jesus and praying for themselves, they will be shown to be not sick. “Is there any evidence that faith healing works? The first step in approaching this question is to specify what should be considered proof that an ailment has been healed by a supernatural method. In my opinion, three criteria must be met: (1) the ailment must be one that normally doesn't recover without treatment; (2) there must not have been any medical treatment that would be expected to influence the ailment; and (3) both diagnosis and recovery must be demonstrable by detailed medical evidence.” [7]These three criteria are what are considered scientific controls and allow for the repeatability and reliability of a therapy to be found. I would like to say that if a therapy is not repeatable or reliable it cannot be considered effective. The short answer to this sub question is – they fail to be shown to be efficacious. Studies have been formulated on intercessory prayer, faith healing and the like – all fall quite short of the bar. My opponent has pointed to a meta study of 16 studies on positive thinking and has offered up the ABC News quote of “"In each case the better a patient's expectations about how they would do after surgery or some health procedure, the better they did." [Pro] The ABC News link provided did not have the actual study cited so I could not look into it further, i would like to have a direct link to it when my opponent responds. Needless to say, this meta study sounds vaguely familiar to previous studies I’ve read about. Meta-analysis is a tough route to take when trying to gain information from a group of studies. The problem is that as a study of prayers effects on health is evolved and better controlled for and its numbers are expanded it proves to be little more than noise if any effect at all. Doing a meta study on a group of smaller and less well controlled studies does not allow a researcher to draw new conclusions, necessarily. If you have horrible studies that are the basis of your meta study you are not going to be able to draw a conclusion of any importance out. Meta-analysis is strictly useless if the studies are looking at differing populations, outcomes controls and so forth. It is only useful if you are looking at a number of studies that were all conducted in similar ways and with similar goals. There was one such study that was conducted at Arizona State University by David Hodge brought together 17 studies in a meta-analysis and it fell apart out of the gate. [8] There was a larger definitive trial conducted during his analysis that blows his study away, actually suggesting that prayer led to complications – “CONCLUSIONS: Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.” [9] Clearly this is a problem in that even if my opponent is able to find another meta study that points to positive results, it would be great if there were more definitive results to be pointed to. 1. http://healingherald.org... << many more2. http://www.ibethel.org... << many more3. http://healingherald.org... 4. http://derrenbrown.co.uk...5. http://skeptoid.com...6. http://whywontgodhealamputees.com...7. http://www.quackwatch.org...8. http://www.sagepub.com...9. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...