More lying and evading.

Again. I'll show you for the lying weasel you are.

NY Times By BENEDICT CAREY Published: March 31, 2006

Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who
were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of
post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of
the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.

Because it is the most scientifically rigorous investigation of whether
prayer can heal illness, the study, begun almost a decade ago and involving
more than 1,800 patients, has for years been the subject of speculation.

The question has been a contentious one among researchers. Proponents have
argued that prayer is perhaps the most deeply human response to disease, and
that it may relieve suffering by some mechanism that is not yet understood.
Skeptics have contended that studying prayer is a waste of money and that it
presupposes supernatural intervention, putting it by definition beyond the
reach of science.

At least 10 studies of the effects of prayer have been carried out in the
last six years, with mixed results. The new study was intended to overcome
flaws in the earlier investigations. The report was scheduled to appear in
The American Heart Journal next week, but the journal's publisher released
it online yesterday.

In a hurriedly convened news conference, the study's authors, led by Dr.
Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and director of the Mind/Body Medical
Institute near Boston, said that the findings were not the last word on the
effects of so-called intercessory prayer. But the results, they said, raised
questions about how and whether patients should be told that prayers were
being offered for them.

"One conclusion from this is that the role of awareness of prayer should be
studied further," said Dr. Charles Bethea, a cardiologist at Integris
Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City and a co-author of the study.

Other experts said the study underscored the question of whether prayer was
an appropriate subject for scientific study.

"The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence
to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified,
and that makes for bad science and bad religion," said Dr. Richard Sloan, a
professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia and author of a forthcoming
book, "Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine."

The study cost $2.4 million, and most of the money came from the John
Templeton Foundation, which supports research into spirituality. The
government has spent more than $2.3 million on prayer research since 2000.

Dean Marek, a chaplain at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a
co-author of the report, said the study said nothing about the power of
personal prayer or about prayers for family members and friends.

Working in a large medical center like Mayo, Mr. Marek said, "You hear tons
of stories about the power of prayer, and I don't doubt them."

In the study, the researchers monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals who
received coronary bypass surgery, in which doctors reroute circulation
around a clogged vein or artery.

The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third
was not. Half the patients who received the prayers were told that they were
being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive
prayers.

The researchers asked the members of three congregations - St. Paul's
Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester,
Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City - to
deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials
of their last names.

The congregations were told that they could pray in their own ways, but they
were instructed to include the phrase, "for a successful surgery with a
quick, healthy recovery and no complications."

Analyzing complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers
found no differences between those patients who were prayed for and those
who were not.

In another of the study's findings, a significantly higher number of the
patients who knew that they were being prayed for - 59 percent - suffered
complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain. The
authors left open the possibility that this was a chance finding. But they
said that being aware of the strangers' prayers also may have caused some of
the patients a kind of performance anxiety.