At times, science has sought to determine whether intercessory prayer for sick people actually helps heal them. For thousands of years, some people have believed in such a power. But new Brandeis University research in the Journal of Religion shows that over the last four decades, medical studies of intercessory prayer—the prayer of strangers at a distance—actually say more about the scientists conducting the studies than about the power of prayer to heal.

 

After talking with physicians who wondered about the power of prayer to heal patients, Brandeis sociologist Wendy Cadge, an expert on the intersection of religion and medicine in contemporary American society, set out to research medical studies of intercessory prayer, the first year such studies were published in the English language medical literature. She evaluated 18 published studies on intercessory prayer that were conducted between 1965 and 2006. Collectively, the studies provide a snapshot of changing American religious demographics, evolving ideas about the relationship between religion and medical science, and the development of the clinical trial as the gold standard of biomedical research, she says.

 

“I do not know why physicians and scientists conducted these studies,” says Cadge, who this year is the Suzanne Young Murray Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. “But personal religious beliefs appear to have played a role, along with curiosity.”

 

The earliest studies undertaken in the 1960s were based exclusively on Protestant prayers, while more recent studies, reflecting growing social awareness of other religions, combine Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and other prayers, Cadge discovered. Some studies suggested that prayer worked, while others said it didn't.

 

The researchers leading the studies applied clinical scientific methodologies to the study of intercessory prayer, but Cadge found that even that approach was fraught with problems. For example, researchers asked whether the people not being prayed for by the intercessors were truly a control group, since their family members were probably praying for them. Researchers also asked what the right “dosage” of prayer would be, how prayers should be offered, and what to do about non-Christian intercessors.

 

“With double blind clinical trials, scientists tried their best to study something that may be beyond their best tools,” says Cadge, “and reflects more about them and their assumptions than about whether prayer works.”