Faith healing: Does being close enough matter? Study says yes.

In “Faith Healing: Study Finds Proximity Could Be Key To Success Of Healing Prayer”, Medical News Today reports ((07 Aug 2010))

Findings reported from a new international study of healing prayer suggest that prayer for another person's healing just might help -- especially if the one praying is physically near the person being prayed for.

Candy Gunther Brown, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, led the study of "proximal intercessory prayer" for healing. It is available online and will be published in the September 2010 issue of the Southern Medical Journal.

The study, titled "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Proximal Intercessory Prayer (STEPP) on Auditory and Visual Impairments in Rural Mozambique," measured surprising improvements in vision and hearing in economically disadvantaged areas where eyeglasses and hearing aids are not readily available.

"We chose to investigate 'proximal' prayer because that is how a lot of prayer for healing is actually practiced by Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians around the world," Brown said. "These constitute the fastest-growing Christian subgroups globally, with some 500 million adherents, and they are among those most likely to pray expectantly for healing."

For more, go here.
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Prayer: Asking for more than healing

Speaking of prayer (story below), in "Do we have a prayer?" in The American Spectator, editor Quin Hillyer reflects on politicial activists and prayer:

Most of us have known people, too, who swear, absolutely swear, that they are alive today after some dread illness only because the prayers of others got them through. But then we wonder about those like Snow who did not survive, and none of it makes sense. Do prayers work? How? Why? And when they don't seem to, at least not by our understanding, why not?

He notes,

... we know that prayer doesn't necessarily bring comfort, or at least not "comfort" in the way the world usually understands it. Prayer does not bring comfort in the sense of ease or luxury or softness.

Ah ... word study urgently needed here: "Comfort" originally meant "strengthen" (the "com" part = with, and the "fort" part = strength). Later, "comfort" came to mean "ease" or "soothe." That created much misunderstanding around the idea that prayer "comforts" people.

Here is my view as a Catholic Christian: I have myself benefited from several healings that could only be attributed to the power of prayer, however understood. I would encourage anyone to pray, even if they are not a religious believer. Just say, "I know I am not a good person, but this feels too hard for me to bear. If You are out there, help me, please, at least to understand what is happening to me."

The main role of prayer is to put us in touch with God's view of our situation. We benefit from prayer to the extent that it does that. We benefit little from prayer if we view it as a way to make God do what we want.

In that case, even if we seem to get what we want for now, we will not grow into the people we should be. And there will come a time when we don't get what we want, and we also did not learn anything that would help us see the bigger picture. So we stop praying, and stop growing spiritually. Which is very sad because healing is only one of the benefits of prayer.

We are all going to die someday, which means that all healings are temporary. So I would say, by all means ask for healing, but don't stop there. Ask for insight too, for the day when healings come to an end.

Prayer and healing: Some researchers say it can help

According to an Indiana University team, prayer can help bring healing:

Researchers from Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington recently conducted a study on the effects of praying directly with someone for healing. According to Candy Gunther Brown, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at IU and author of the study, "proximal intercessory prayer", as she calls it, can actually help to bring about healing.

Anyone familiar with the placebo effect can see why this might be, irrespective of issues around the supernatural or sectarian religion.

In some ways, those issues just get in the way. If you are a Christian, you might want to note that when Jesus healed the centurion's servant, he never asked whether the servant was a good Jew. He responded to the centurion's prayer for help, and that guy wasn't a Jew, though he was friendly to Jews.

More here on prayer and healing.

Prayer: Intercessory prayer works, according to study

According to a news brief in Science Daily (March 15, 2007),

David R. Hodge, an assistant professor of social work in the College of Human Services at Arizona State University, conducted a comprehensive analysis of 17 major studies on the effects of intercessory prayer -- or prayer that is offered for the benefit of another person -- among people with psychological or medical problems. He found a positive effect.
"There have been a number of studies on intercessory prayer, or prayer offered for the benefit of another person," said Hodge, a leading expert on spirituality and religion. "Some have found positive results for prayer. Others have found no effect. Conducting a meta-analysis takes into account the entire body of empirical research on intercessory prayer. Using this procedure, we find that prayer offered on behalf of another yields positive results."

Apparently, Hodge's work is featured in the March 2007 edition of Social Work Practice . He doesn't suggest that prayer alone will work in situations such as depression.

Most churches that offer healing prayer find that it provides at least some help for sufferers, especially with chronic conditions. It only rarely reverses the course of serious illnesses.

It would be interesting to relate the power of prayer to phenomena like the quantum Zeno effect.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and of Faith@Science. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Does religion protect us against pseudoscience?

A recent study from Baylor University suggests that the answer is yes. In "Look Who's Irrational Now" (Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2008), Mollie Ziegler Hemingway notes,

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

Now, that in itself should not be a surprising finding. For one thing, traditional religious groups tend to oppose occult practices, so the regular attender is likely to be aware of the group's negative view.

One can't help but recall King Saul and the Witch of Endor in 1 Sam 28:

When Saul saw the Philistine army, he was afraid; terror filled his heart.

6 He inquired of the LORD, but the LORD did not answer him by dreams or Urim or prophets.

7 Saul then said to his attendants, "Find me a woman who is a medium, so I may go and inquire of her."

"There is one in Endor," they said.

8 So Saul disguised himself, putting on other clothes, and at night he and two men went to the woman. "Consult a spirit for me," he said, "and bring up for me the one I name."

9 But the woman said to him, "Surely you know what Saul has done. He has cut off the mediums and spiritists from the land. Why have you set a trap for my life to bring about my death?"

Saul's original view, however "non-diverse", was the normal one for traditional Western monotheistic religion. The image here at Wikimedia Commons features Saul and the Witch, and - I think - pretty much captures the terminal goofiness of all that stuff.

Another interesting Baylor finding: Higher education does not affect whether people believe in ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance, and witches.

I am not sure what to make of this finding, as reported, because the beliefs are not all equally ridiculous. As Mario Beauregard and I noted in The Spiritual Brain, there is some laboratory evidence for telepathy as a consistent low-level effect.

And demonic possession is an especially difficult case for surveys. Traditional religions assume that possession is possible in principle, so adherents may say that they believe in it in principle. But they may almost always seek other explanations in practice, believing that God would not permit possession to happen to believers. That does not mean that they literally deny the possibility.

The haunted houses I will simply pass by ...

In any event, as for late night comic Bill Maher - the inspiration for Hemingway's Wall Street Journal piece - and the sponsor of Religulous, an anti-religious documentary:

it turns out that the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O'Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman -- a quintuple bypass survivor -- to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn't accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: "I don't believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory." He has told CNN's Larry King that he won't take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn't even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.

Wow. I am old enough to have been in the long line of people getting the Salk vaccine at my local elementary school in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1956, and I remember the general disappearance of the polio scare in the following years.

Anyway, it turns out that traditional religion is an excellent prescriptive against many superstitions and much pseudoscience

Note: With "psychic healing," we need to define our terms carefully. There is massive evidence for the placebo effect (in research studies, people often get better because they believe they will). Is that psychic healing?

This qualification probably did not affect the surveys of religious folk because they would attribute the healing to the power of prayer and would not use the word "psychic" to explain matters. The main research question in recent yeas has been to distinguish between the effect of prayer for one's own health and prayer for the health of others - intercessory prayer - which, for many, is a religious duty.

Prayer: Are studies of intercessory prayer an insult to God?

In Chapter 8 of The Spiritual Brain, Mario and I talked about an experiment in praying for the sick that didn't work out too well (the Benson study), and the reasons why. In Answering the New Atheism, philosophers Scott Hahn and Ben Wiker also comment, from a philosophical perspective.

First, they note, there is a big difference between studying a cause that is thought to be a natural cause and studying a cause that is thought to be a person. A natural cause must act under the right conditions, but a person (or Person!) hears you and can choose whether to act or not. It is the difference, for example, between using the laws of gravity to pilot an airplane and persuading the boss to let you buy an airplane for the business. Now, the philosophers say,

The error of the double-blind prayer experiment is that it treats God like some kind of natural cause rather than as a personal, rational Being. In doing so, God is being unjustly subjected to a humiliating attempt to manipulate Him by an experiment. In short, the experiment is an insult, and any rational being, superhuman or not, would treat it as such. That does not, of course, mean that praying for healing itself is an insult; we are speaking only of framing such prayer in the context of a manipulative experiment. (p. 57)

That, of course, has always been the difficulty with studying the effects of intercessory prayer as if they were like the effects of Pill A vs. Pill B.

See also:

Are prayer studies a waste of government money? No way!

Prayer studies: From one-way skepticism deliver us!

Prayer: Intercessory prayer works, according to study

Subversive Thinking responds to Mesner review of The Spiritual Brain

Jime Sanaka kindly writes to say:

I wrote in my blog a long reply to Doug Mesner's uncharitable review of your book Any feedback or comments would be much appreciated.

Sanaka has this episode in mind. He writes,

(Remember that Mesner's review was written for the Skeptic Magazine; thus, his rhetorical tactics explained in this post makes full sense if you keep in mind to what audience his review is presented to. He's trying to reach the audience of that magazine and prevent the readers to actually read the book. Given that most of the readers of that magazine are materialistic atheists or agnostics, and many of them openly hostile to religion, Mesner's rhetorical strategy to discredit the book associating it with creationism and religion will work for that audience)

Note that Mesner quoted part of the information in the inside flap of the book (an information likely added by the publisher, not by the authors; omitting this possibility, Mesner uses such information to cast doubts about the authors' intellectual honesty).

Sanaka is certainly correct about that. Authors have very little to say, usually, about the promotional copy written for their book, beyond correcting the most basic errors of fact. I have been formally advised by literary coaches to be cautious about bugging the publicist about anything else, because publishers' staff can lose interest in a book whose authors are a pain to work with.

Anyway, you are quite right: If someone wants to review a book, positively or negatively, it is best to focus on what the authors say in their own words, not what the publicist says.

For example, for the record, I am not Denis Leary (a man) and do not have a degree from MIT, as some have claimed on the Internet. I have an honours degree in English Language and Literature from Sir Wilfred Laurier University ('71). That's the level at which I have the right to protest what is said about me.

My main complaint about the approach of the Skeptics at Skeptic Magazine is that, so far as I can see, they major in one-way skepticism. They are skeptical about some things, but not others. So there is no internal check for their own biases.

For example, faced with a story about healing through prayer, they would immediately seek to debunk it, irrespective of evidence.

As a Catholic, I believe that healing through prayer happens - but that, of course, does not require me to believe every such story I hear - or even most of them. Mine is a two-way skepticism about such matters.

Again, thanks much, Mr. Sanaka, and by the way, your English is very good.

My presentation on The Spiritual Brain in Seattle

Yesterday, I gave a presentation on Mario's and my new book, The Spiritual Brain (HarperOne, September 1)to a private conference in Seattle.

Looking out at the audience, I realized clearly that nonmaterialist neuroscience (neuroscience that assumes that the mind is real) is NOT just a way for fifty academic bores to contend at the taxpayers' expense about whether or not the mind is real.

Even if the mind were not real, the time and money they waste is real. And it is at the expense of learning how to help the mind heal the brain and body.

I stressed the practical value of treatments for disorders based on harnessing mental attention and the placebo (remembered wellness) effect. I also encouraged an evidence-based approach to the efect of spirituality on health, the effect of prayer on healing, and the effect of near death experiences on life change.

The materialist, by contrast, is stuck trying to develop a model that proves that nothing is really happening, everyone is deluded, it's all wrong, all bad, et cetera.

The presentation went pretty well, and many people bought copies of the book.

It was the first time I'd tried PowerPoint, so I just typed out the key points. Quite honestly - an experienced presenter told me later that I shouldn't do that. I am (he said) a natural speaker and very entertaining, and knew the material well enough that the printed key points (which always seemed to me to appear in the "wrong" order) were sometimes a distraction. Well, the certainly distracted me. He recommends using pictures, charts, and graphs instead. That sounds like fun, and I am going to put together something like that.

Meanwhile, the audio book (from Tantor), in several formats, will be available in December.

Big mystery: Why you feel sick when doctors tell you you are

Of New Scientist's Michael Brooks's 13 things that don't make sense, the thirteenth was the nocebo effect (02 September 2009).

In Latin, "nocebo" means "I will harm." It is the opposite of "placebo" which means "I will please." Practically, just as placebo means that the patient gets better because he has been told he will, nocebo means that a patient gets worse precisely because medics have predicted pain, debility, or death.

It was easy to dismiss accounts of voodoo death, but Brooks recounts the following case:

In the 1970s, for example, doctors diagnosed a man with end-stage liver cancer, and told him he had just a few months to live. Though the patient died in the predicted time, an autopsy showed the doctors had been mistaken. There was a tiny tumour, but it had not spread. It seemed the doctors' prognosis had been a death curse.

I am not clear why that doesn't make sense. A person who is informed by a credible source that he will die could surely have a heart attack or allow a chronic condition to overtake him. The placebo effect works very well indeed, so we should expect its evil twin to do likewise.

It is only a b ig mystery if you think that the mind is an illusion generated by the dance of neurons in the brain and has no causal power. Otherwise, the sense of mystery is completely absent.

Interestingly, the Criminal Code of Canada says two relevant things: After denying that deaths supposedly caused by “the influence of the mind alone” (= witchcraft, the "evil eye", etc.) are culpable homicide, the Code nonetheless adds this rider: “This section does not apply where a person causes the death of a child or sick person by willfully frightening him” (sec. 228). Now, the doctors mentioned in Brooks's account are not in the dock for this, because they honestly believed what they told that man. But should they have told him the news in that way?

I once interviewed a radiologist whose key job was "bad news from radiology." I asked her how she coped. She said, basically, my patients are usually in considerable pain and have been sick for a long time, and they know something is very wrong. Her method was, before telling them the results, to set up a further treatment plan. The plan usually amounted to palliative care. But, she said, they are never left alone, never abandoned. She seemed a wise lady to me.

And I think that, with her approach, if a patient's diagnosis turns out to be wrong, he won't deteriorate rapidly or die any time soon, so a new diagnosis will be sought. And the nocebo effect will be out looking for a job.

More on the nocebo effect at The Mindful Hack:

Evolutionary psychology: Misunderstanding superstition

Commentator Dinesh D'Souza on The Spiritual Brain: Including stuff he didn't know (No way is that his fault. The medical and parmaceutical community finds all these topics very difficult, and they discuss them only reluctantly.)

Prayer studies: From one-way skepticism, deliver us

Faith as one ofthe healing arts

Commentator Dinesh D'Souza on The Spiritual Brain: Including stuff he didn't know

Commentator Dinesh D'Souza blogged on The Spiritual Brain recently:

We find the materialist view ably expressed in Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis. What Crick finds astonishing is that our thoughts, emotions and feelings consist entirely in the physiological activity in the circuitry of the brain. Daniel Dennett argues that "mind" is simply a term for what the brain does. And how do we know that the brain and the mind are essentially the same? The best evidence is that when the brain is damaged, the injury affects the mind. Patients whose brains atrophy due to stroke, for instance, lose their ability to distinguish colors or to empathize with others.

But in his book The Spiritual Brain, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard shows why the Crick-Dennett position is based on a fallacy. Yes, the brain is the necessary locus or venue for the mind to operate. It does not follow that the two are the same. Beauregard gives a telling analogy. "Olympic swimming events require an Olympic class swimming pool. But the pool does not create the Olympic events; it makes them feasible at a given location." Far from being identical to the mind, Beauregard argues that the brain "is an organ suitable for connecting the mind to the rest of the universe."

D'Souza is correct in saying that Mario and I defend the non-materialist position regarding the mind.

He mentions in the review that he had been unaware of the existence of the nocebo effect:

Beauregard also writes about something I didn't know much about: the nocebo effect. "The nocebo effect is the harmful health effect created by a sick person's belief and expectation that a powerful source of harm has been contacted or administered." So if patients are strongly convinced that a particular pill will give them nausea, they frequently become nauseous, even when the pill they have taken is not the one they expected but only a sugar pill.

Yes, and that's why the doctor tells us that a given treatment ""will only hurt a little bit." Naturally, she hopes that is true, but telling us to expect a lot of pain is a sure way to produce more of it (a nocebo effect).

Here are some Hack posts on D'Souza:

"Atheist Dawkins blasted in Skeptical magazine"

"Religion profs who don't know much religion?"

"Alister McGrath on Richard Dawkins: Athiesm is simple-minded narcissism"

"Secularism: Early post-mortem results"

Here are some Hack stories on the nocebo effect:

"Does behaviorism work?"

"Prayer studies: From one-way skepticism, deliver us"

"Faith as one of the healing arts"

"If it hurts you more than it hurts someone else, are you just a sissy?"