preview

The Power of Prayer Essay

Better Essays

The Power of Prayer

Introduction

There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence about the efficacy of prayer in healing. As mentioned at the beginning of chapter eight in our text, many people have friends or relatives who recovered from illnesses when someone was praying for them, or who can attest to the power of prayer in other affairs. This makes scientists wonder. Can prayer help heal the sick? Do meditations for the recovery of an ill person, based either on religious faith or on belief in psychokinesis, have any real effect on health? Can science test the power of prayer? Though it requires putting aside the Bible’s warning not to test God, several scientists have designed experiments to try to determine if prayer has an …show more content…

Distance Healing: AIDS study, Targ et.al.
A study conducted by Elisabeth Targ tested the effect of distant healing on 40 patients with AIDS. She recruited 40 healing practioners of many different faiths who prayed or performed rituals for an assigned patient for one hour a day, six days a week, for six months. She rotated the photographs of the 20 non-control group patients among the healing practitioners each week so that each patient was prayed for by many different practitioners. The control group contained 20 patients who were medical “twins” of patients in the prayer group. All patients received regular medical check-ups in addition to any medical attention necessitated by illness.

To compare the health of the groups, Targ looked for the occurrence of 23 AIDS related illnesses. The statistical tests used were “paired t-test for all continuous or multi-level variables, Wilcoxon signed ranks test when the data appeared to be skewed or contained outliers, and McNemar's test for 2x2 tables comparing paired binary variables”. Targ concluded that “over the 6 month study period the DH group experienced significantly fewer outpatient doctor visits, fewer hospitalizations, fewer days of hospitalization, fewer new AIDS-defining diseases, as well as a

Get Access