Diagnosis: Prayer hurt heart patients

This is pretty funny. Patients who were prayed for without knowing it had similar outcomes to those who didn't get prayed for, and those who knew they were being prayed for did worst of all. (This certainly explains a couple of my exam grades in college, Grandma.) Maybe now people will quit studying prayer. It bugs me every time they announce another study that shows that prayer helped people recover from this or that. Oh, well, I wasn't praying for his surgery before, but this changes everything? Studies that thinly hide attempts to prove various matters of faith only contribute to the popular attitude among intellectuals that believers must be dogmatists or naive, and unfortunately, this outcome dresses that stigma up in poetic justice. I sense a certain giggle in the voice of this editorial in the American Heart Journal, where the study was published: they said researchers "must be vigilant in asking the question of whether a well-intentioned, loving, heartfelt healing prayer might inadvertently harm or kill vulnerable patients in certain circumstances."