| hospital? (2) How are these effects characterized, if present?” Over ten months, 393 patients admitted to the CCU at San Francisco General Hospital were randomized to an intercessory prayer group (192 patients) or to a control group (201 patients). After randomization, each patient in the prayer group was assigned to three to seven intercessors, who were all “born-again Christians (according to the Gospel of John 3:3)” of various denominations. Dr. Byrd wrote: “The patients’ first name, diagnosis, and general condition, along with pertinent updates on their condition, were given to the intercessors. The intercessory prayer was done outside the hospital daily until the patient was discharged from the hospital. Under the direction of a coordinator, each intercessor was asked to pray daily for a rapid recovery and for prevention of complications and death, in addition to other areas of prayer they believed to be beneficial to the patients.” The results were summarized in “Table 2” of the Byrd study entitled “Results of intercessory Prayer.” There was no statistically significant difference between the prayer and control group in these measurements: days in CCU after entry; days in hospital after entry; number of discharge medications. Only when a list of 26 “New Problems, Diagnoses, and Therapeutic Events After Entry” was compiled was any statistical difference found and then only in 6 of the items: congestive heart failure (.03); diuretics (.05)_; cardiopulmonary arrest (.005); intubation/ventilation (.002). When Dr. Byrd subjected these items to multivariate analysis (a statistical method of analyzing the overall significance when multiple factors are positive), he found the prayer group to better the control at the statistically significant level of (.0001). In “Table 3,)” “Results of Scoring the Postentry Hospital Course,” he constructed three categories, “Good, Intermediate, and Bad,” using a self-designed and previously not scientifically validated method. The prayer group bettered the control group at a level of (.01). Although this study appears to meet the “gold standard” of a large, prospective, randomized, double-blind investigation, scientists have pointed out a number of flaws: * The study was not “blinded” in two respects: 1) Janet Greene, the coordinator of the study, on whom Dr. Byrd depended for the collection of data, knew exactly who was being prayed for, and interacted regularly with the patients in the study. 2) “Table 3” was formulated by Dr. Byrd at the request of editors who initially evaluated his paper after the “blinding” had been removed. * There was no difference in clear-cut end points such as days in the CCU, days in the hospital, or mortality between the two groups. Only when complicated statistical analyses were done on a long list of items do any data emerge that favor the prayed-for group—hardly evidence of an all-powerful deity. Also, if prayer had any effect, an overall improvement would be expected. Of the six items where the prayer group did better, four were of borderline statistical significance and only two were clearly significant. Are we to conclude that the deity is only concerned with reducing antibiotic use and ventilating patients in the CCU? This study provides no information on the physicians involved in this study. This information could be important since certain physicians use antibiotics and intubate patients much more readily than others. * The method that Dr. Byrd used in his scoring in “Table 3” had not been validated by an previous studies. -> page four |