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"They said there was a 50-50 chance that it was cancer," says Amanda, a 32-year-old in Alexandria, Va. She had to wait two days for the biopsy results. During those two days, friends and family rallied around to comfort her -- and to pray. "Numerous people, family and friends, were praying for me," Amanda says. "Everybody said, 'Our prayers are with you.' I was on prayer lists all over the city."

A friend lit candles for Amanda at her church. Two Episcopal priests came to her hospital room to issue formal prayers. One of them laid hands on her as he prayed, and Amanda felt a strange heat passing into her body. Two days later her biopsy report came back. Benign.

So what have we here? Another unlucky victim of fate who lucked out in the end? Did the pendulum on those 50-50 odds just happen to swing her way? Or is the explanation less random, more mysterious -- did faith and prayer have something to do with it?

It's one of the first tenets of spiritual belief: Pray for the sick, they'll get better. Most secular humanist types frown on such supernatural notions, but even your most jaded agnostic will break down and mutter a few words to the sky when some dire malady lays his mother low.

But does it do any good? Everybody's got an opinion but nobody knows for sure, because the faith-health dichotomy has never received much in the way of serious scientific scrutiny.

Until now. A massive study published in the Oct. 25 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine (a journal of the American Medical Association) showed that heart patients who had someone praying for them suffered fewer complications than other patients.

Researchers at the Mid America Heart Institute of St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City studied 990 patients admitted to the institute's coronary care unit in a one-year period. The patients were randomly divided into two groups. One group was prayed for daily by community volunteers -- intercessors -- and the other patients had nobody assigned to pray for them. The intercessors were given the patients' first names and were asked to pray daily for "a speedy recovery with no complications." It was a blind trial: None of the patients knew they were involved in a study.

The researchers, led by Dr. William Harris, created an itemized score-sheet to measure what happened to both groups of patients, and after four weeks there was a striking result: The prayed-for patients had suffered 10 percent fewer complications, ranging from chest pain to full-blown cardiac arrest. The study concludes, "This result suggests that prayer may be an effective adjunct to standard medical care."

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of Duke University's Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health, has spent his entire professional life looking at how spirituality affects a person's physical well-being. This particular study is significant, he says, "because it's published in an AMA journal, it has a huge sample, and it shows significant results."

Koenig is the author of "The Healing Power of Faith" (Simon & Schuster), a compilation of scientific studies that examine the impact of religious belief on physical and mental health. "These studies are inexplicable within the realm of science," he says. "There's no traditional scientific mechanism in action, and scientists have a problem with that."

Dr. Stephen Barrett has a big, big problem with that. "This study is a well-designed waste of time," says Barrett, board chairman of the health fraud watchdog organization Quackwatch. "You can't generate magical forces with magical thinking. It's absurd."

Dr. Michael Janson takes a more diplomatic view. "It's impossible to explain from a scientific basis, and I'm personally skeptical," says Janson, past president of the American College for the Advancement of Science and columnist for the health Web site drugstore.com. "But I don't want to preclude the possibility of things I don't understand. A thousand years ago there were lots of things we said were impossible."

Barrett dismisses the entire study as a roll of the dice. Though the 10 percent difference may seem like divine intervention, he says the study has no clinical significance. "What it reflects is a lucky hit," he says. "A chance phenomenon."

Next page | If you pray against someone, can that do harm?