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The Power of Prayer in Medicine
The above headline is the title of a story from the November 6, 2001
online issue of WebMD. The article starts off by reporting on two recent
studies involving the use of prayer in medicine. In
one of these recent studies, women at an in vitro fertilization clinic had
higher pregnancy rates when total strangers were praying for them. In the
other study the findings showed that people undergoing risky
cardiovascular surgery have fewer complications when they are the focus of
prayer groups.
Rogerio A. Lobo, MD, the chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia
University School of Medicine in New York City, published his study which
appeared in the September issue of the Journal of Reproductive Medicine.
The fertilization research was conducted at a hospital in Seoul, Korea,
and found a doubling of the pregnancy rate among women who were prayed
for.
The study involved 199 women who were undergoing in vitro fertility
treatments at a hospital in Seoul, Korea, during 1998 and 1999. Half the
women were randomly assigned to have one of several Christian prayer
groups in the U.S., Canada, and Australia pray for them. A photograph of
each patient was given to "her" prayer group. While one set of
prayer groups prayed directly for the women, a second set of prayer groups
prayed for the first set, and a third group prayed for both groups.
"We were very careful to control this as rigorously as we
could," states Dr. Lobo. "Neither the women nor their
medical caregivers knew about the study, or that anyone was praying for
them. We deliberately set it up in an unbiased way. That meant not
informing patients they were being prayed for, so it would not influence
the women's outcome."
The results of the study were that the women in the "prayed
for" group became pregnant twice as often as the other women.
"We were not expecting to find a positive result," says Lobo.
"Researchers have re-analyzed the data several times, to detect any
discrepancies, but have been unable to find any," he says.
In a separate study, Mitchell W. Krucoff, MD, director of the Ischemia
Monitoring Laboratory at Duke University Medical Center and the Durham
Veterans Administration Medical Center in Durham, NC., studied 150
patients, who had serious heart problems, and were all scheduled for an
angioplasty procedure. According to Dr Krucoff, the results of that
study showed that patients who were prayed for during their procedure had
far fewer complications. His results were published in the current issue
of the American Heart Journal. "This was a very rigorously
controlled study, just as we would look at any therapeutic, a new
cardiovascular drug, a new stent, and see the results in terms of
patients' outcomes," states Dr. Krucoff.
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