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A Prayer Before Dying

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Issue 10.12 | December 2002

THE ASTONISHING STORY OF A DOCTOR WHO SUBJECTED FAITH TO THE RIGORS OF SCIENCE - AND THEN BECAME A TEST SUBJECT HERSELF.

By Po Bronson

THE THIRD-MOST ODDS-DEFYING, EYE-POPPING DISCOVERY IN THE LIFE AND WORK OF ELISABETH TARG, MD

In July 1995, back when AIDS was still a death sentence, psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ and her co-researchers enrolled 20 patients with advanced AIDS in a randomized, double-blind pilot study at the UC San Francisco Medical Center. All patients received standard care, but psychic healers prayed for the 10 in the treatment group. The healers lived an average of 1,500 miles away from the patients. None of the patients knew which group they had been randomly assigned to, and thus whether they were being prayed for. During the six-month study, four of the patients died - a typical mortality rate. When the data was unblinded, the researchers learned that the four who had died were in the control group.

All 10 who were prayed for were still alive.

THE FOLLOW-UP STUDY

A lot of studies had investigated the effect of prayer on healing, but they were methodologically sloppy and their findings couldn't be replicated. In July 1996, Targ began a confirmation study, one with a larger sample and a more exacting protocol. It is widely acknowledged as the most scientifically rigorous attempt ever to discover if prayer can heal.

By this time, triple-drug therapy for those with AIDS had begun, and quite miraculously AIDS patients stopped dying. So rather than just measuring mortality, the replication trial also tallied the occurrence of 23 AIDS-related illnesses that appeared during the six months of the study, from ulcers to encephalitis.

Forty patients were recruited. They filled out questionnaires, had photos taken, and signed consent forms that indicated they had a 50/50 chance of being prayed for by faraway psychic healers. They were free to pray for themselves and have family and friends pray for them as well - the trial design assumed everyone would get a "baseline" amount of prayer from loved ones. Their blood was drawn, and a computer matched them to a statistical twin - a counterpart with a similar CD4+ level, age, and number of previous AIDS-related complications. The computer randomly assigned one of each pair to a control group and the other to a treatment group.

The photos of those in the treatment group were sent to 40 healing practitioners, ranging from rabbis to Native American medicine men to bioenergetic psychics. These healers performed their rituals one hour a day for six consecutive days. Each week for 10 weeks they rotated, so each test-group patient received distant healing from 10 practitioners. The healers kept logs and were not paid. They never met the subjects in person.

The photos of the control group were kept in a locked drawer.

Six months later, the data was unblinded.

THE SECOND-MOST ODDS-DEFYING, EYE-POPPING DISCOVERY IN THE LIFE AND WORK OF ELISABETH TARG

The research results showed that the subjects who were not prayed for spent 600 percent more days in the hospital. They contracted 300 percent as many AIDS-related illnesses. That's a pretty sensationalistic way of saying those who were prayed for were a lot less sick. Here's the somewhat less-sensational way of framing the results: The control group spent a total of 68 days in the hospital receiving treatment for 35 AIDS-related illnesses. The treatment group spent only 10 days in the hospital for a mere 13 illnesses.

This begs all sorts of questions, which we will get to, but for the moment, consider the following:

The chance of this occurring randomly is less than 1 in 20, meaning it is statistically significant.

There was no placebo effect. For the patients, being less sick didn't correlate with believing they were being prayed for by the psychic healers. Not even close. Nearly 55 percent of both groups imagined or guessed or believed they were being prayed for - and they did no better than the others. [...]

WHO ARE THESE PSYCHIC HEALERS?

The usual wackos - but experienced wackos. On average, they had 17 years' experience, and each had treated more than a hundred patients from a distance. Many had graduated from a bioenergetic healing school on Long Island run by Barbara Brennan, a former NASA physicist. They had a variety of religious backgrounds, from Jewish to Christian to Buddhist to shamanist; however, their method of prayer was not an appeal to a higher power. Rather than ask God for help, the healers were directed to send positive healing energy, to direct an intention for health and well-being to the subject. The point was to test the ability of a person to affect another remotely, in a one-to-one relationship.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/prayer.html

Bela wrote:WHO ARE THESE PSYCHIC HEALERS?

The usual wackos - but experienced wackos. On average, they had 17 years' experience, and each had treated more than a hundred patients from a distance. Many had graduated from a bioenergetic healing school on Long Island run by Barbara Brennan, a former NASA physicist. They had a variety of religious backgrounds, from Jewish to Christian to Buddhist to shamanist; however, their method of prayer was not an appeal to a higher power. Rather than ask God for help, the healers were directed to send positive healing energy, to direct an intention for health and well-being to the subject. The point was to test the ability of a person to affect another remotely, in a one-to-one relationship.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/prayer.html

Bela

So, this was not prayer after all, was it?

[i]So, this was not prayer after all, was it?[/i]

I suppose not. still it was using a meditative or spriitual state to intervene in a situation... similar to appealing to 3rd party intervention but not the same as prayer, no.

Prayer works if you believe it does. I believe that.

bineaz wrote:Prayer works if you believe it does. I believe that.

such is my experience... not always in a convenient or expected fashion however

OK, I'm impressed.

I look up at the banner on this page, and its an ad for psychics.

does WF actually serve up ads that are targeted to the discussion in a thread?

bineaz wrote:Prayer works if you believe it does. I believe that.

I'll say even more, prayer helps, but there is nothing supernatural or even religious about the way prayer might help.

I'll say even more, prayer helps, but there is nothing supernatural or even religious about the way prayer might help.

please, explain.

what if-if the study was conducted correctly--patients didn't know they were being prayed for?

of course, your definition of 'supernatural' would be relevent.

still, are you referring, perhaps, to a cousin of the placebo effect?

Bela - Yes, the ads are tailored to the title of the thread.

Bela wrote:

bineaz wrote:Prayer works if you believe it does. I believe that.

such is my experience... not always in a convenient or expected fashion however

I agree. That's why you also pray for your enemies.

Ali wrote:Bela - Yes, the ads are tailored to the title of the thread.

wow.

I mean, search engines have been doing this for year--I remember buying my first word on Yahoo years ago--it just never occurred to me that they would do it at a forum, but it makes sense.

they have our eyeballs.

the google mail thing creeps me out, though. how much information on ourselves do we want 'them' to collect?

Jesus and the Gospels — Lecture 1 Excerpt: Why Not "The Historical Jesus"?

What are the limits of history? The limit of history is that it cannot provide precisely what the imagination most desires, namely, a sense of Jesus's identity and self-understanding, a grasp of the meaning of his life. Again, I agree with Strauss that history cannot get at the miraculous or the supernatural, so if we begin with the understanding that, in fact, the Gospels describe Jesus as somebody who is supernatural, who does perform wonders, who is resurrected from the dead, it is quite clear that history can't get at all of that, and so a great deal of what the Gospels are talking about simply is not accessible to history. It has to be bracketed; it has to be read out rather than read into the Gospels.

Furthermore, as ancient writings, the sources do not give us a life of Jesus. They do not give us his psychological development from childhood to adulthood. They do not give us his own self-understanding. They do not give us his motivation; they do not give us notes from his diary. We do not have Jesus firsthand, so we don't have what he thought about himself nor do we have the meaning of what he did apart from the Gospels. It is the Gospel narratives themselves that not only provide most of the historical facts but also the meaning ascribed to those facts.

Here's the problem: That meaning is woven into the fabric of the narratives as such, and those narratives are all written from the perspective of faith in the resurrection. That is, they are all written by people who think that Jesus is not simply a dead guy of the past but is the resurrected lord. Historians therefore are both enabled and constrained by our most important witnesses; the very narratives that give us Jesus also put up placards everywhere saying, “You can't get to Jesus as a historical figure beyond the bare facts that you're able to get. Either you accept our interpretation or you're going to have to work up another interpretation of the facts.” When historians seek to move beyond the boundaries posted by the sources themselves, two kinds of distortions occur. [...]

Our class will unfold in four quite unequal parts. The first set of lectures sets the stage for the composition of the Gospels by placing their composition within the historical, cultural, and religious setting of the Christian movement. We need to understand a little bit about the basics about what were the first Christians claiming about themselves and under what circumstances were they making these claims. The second set of lectures, the largest part of the class, considers the four canonical Gospels, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, in their social contexts, in their literary arrangements, and especially in their portrayal of Jesus and of discipleship, because the two things go very much together. The portrayal of Jesus and the portrayal of what it means to be a follower of Jesus are the key points in each of these literary productions.

The third series of lectures provides a sense of the wide array of Apocryphal Gospels, including several associated with Gnosticism, and, in the process, we will discuss some of the claims that are today made about these Gospels and the sort of controversy that surrounds those Gospels. The final two presentations of the class take up the question of the relationship between these many literary representations and the one Jesus and then consider the many ways in which Jesus continues to inspire Gospels. This is a rich and intriguing and difficult topic. I look forward to exploring it with you.

http://www.teach12.com/ttc/assets/excer ... p?ai=18099

Bela wrote:

I'll say even more, prayer helps, but there is nothing supernatural or even religious about the way prayer might help.

please, explain.

what if-if the study was conducted correctly--patients didn't know they were being prayed for?

Bela, so which is it? Were they or were they not aware?

After all, if they were, then, maybe, the very psychological fact of knowing they are being prayed for is very helpful, at least on psychological level, where some of our health problems do originate...

Ali wrote:Bela - Yes, the ads are tailored to the title of the thread.

so what would happen if we retitled this the Jennifer Love Hewwit nude thread?

Bela, so which is it? Were they or were they not aware?

well, the study said the people were randomly assigned, and:

There was no placebo effect. For the patients, being less sick didn't correlate with believing they were being prayed for by the psychic healers. Not even close. Nearly 55 percent of both groups imagined or guessed or believed they were being prayed for - and they did no better than the others

so the prayer (or intervention or fuzzy thoughts) seem to have had an effect even though no one was certain they were being prayed for.


I do energy work myself so its interesting to see what the medical profession is doing with it.

Bela wrote:

Bela, so which is it? Were they or were they not aware?

well, the study said the people were randomly assigned, and:

There was no placebo effect. For the patients, being less sick didn't correlate with believing they were being prayed for by the psychic healers. Not even close. Nearly 55 percent of both groups imagined or guessed or believed they were being prayed for - and they did no better than the others

so the prayer (or intervention or fuzzy thoughts) seem to have had an effect even though no one was certain they were being prayed for.


I do energy work myself so its interesting to see what the medical profession is doing with it.

They showed a Russian emmigree on Unsolved Mysteries re-run (Friday) who does healing through some energy crap with his hands. He is an atheist, so no prayer there

They showed a Russian emmigree on Unsolved Mysteries re-run (Friday) who does healing through some energy crap with his hands.

If he does healing, I don't know if I'd call it "crap"--YMMV.

He is an atheist, so no prayer there

IIRC, the experiment ref'd above was more about remote healing than prayer healing...?

I'm not selling either except to say, if it works, it works, and why not use it.

Bela wrote:If he does healing, I don't know if I'd call it "crap"--YMMV.

Well, we really do not know if he is actually healing or using the POS.

Either way, people do get better.

POS? 'Power of spirit'?

There are many ways to do healings. Most healers I know use a little prayer but tend to be more active.

Bela wrote:POS? 'Power of spirit'?

POS = Power of Suggestion

oh, right.

I'm thinking about marketing a wonder pill--

it has been shown, in countless studies, to alleviate depression, grow hair on bald men, cure cancer, impotence, and weight gain.

Its called Placebo

Don't forget to mention bigger boobs and smaller waists

as far as I know, bigger boobs and smaller waists have only been shown to cure depression and impotence.

I think I know the story you all are referring too. The russian guy was running a scam. And he tried doing in thing in the Philipines too. But cops eventually figured out what he was up too and was lookimg for him.

No, that is not the right guy.

I don't know about the Russian guy.

I remember at worldcrossing this guy would post about how great Russian picture brides were and how lousy American women were. He was trying to drum up business for a picture bride web site.

That is my only Russian anecdote, if not antidote.

Bela

One thing is true, Russian mail order brides are far more beautiful than your regular average American woman. Those are all beautiful women. Those that are not do not get into those catalogs.

Frankly, though, I find these catalogs a bit demeaning. And I've heard a few nightmare stories from some of the ladies who found themselves an American husband.

One thing is true, Russian mail order brides are far more beautiful than your regular average American woman. Those are all beautiful women. Those that are not do not get into those catalogs.

Oh, I'm sure. I've looked at a few of the sites and they are gorgeous, but the web sites seem to be a bit of a put on.

I actually had a gorgeous German friend ask me to marry her for a green card, but I got paranoid. Now I wonder what would have happened if we did...