This article made me laugh almost throughout reading it. I found it entirely too funny to not post here (full disclosure: I am me, sleep-deprived delirious, and Atheist Plus).Basically a group of American scientists, led by Dr. Herber Benson from the Harvard Medical School, asked three Christian groups to pray for specific heart surgery patients. The prayers were given first names and last initials of the patients and were asked to pray for "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for each patient starting the night prior to their surgery and continuing for two weeks. The scientists then studied what effects, if any, there were in 1,800 patients being observed over 30 days.
I started chuckling in the second paragraph, where Dr. Benson "emphasized that they looked only at the effect of prayer on the patients in their study and could not address questions such as whether God exists or answers prayers." But what really takes the cake is the conclusion; the results showed that prayer had no effect on the patients' recovery, and the kicker is that there were actually more complications in patients who knew they were being prayed for!
Okay, so it's funny enough that this study was done - let's not rely on the scientific resources that are required to cut open your chest, muck around in there, sew you back up, and load you up with drugs to heal it all up. No, I think chanting incantations to an invisible being in the sky is what will make for a successful surgery. In this study at least, it appears the latter option is not where you should be putting your faith for recovery from surgery, since apparently the prayers to God resulted not in better surgery results but increased complications. As a result, this Atheist Plus can't help but laugh her ass off at the prayer monkeys.
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