:jakko:
cannot post on this one try... Thread: Late Night Sweep KC (Page 6)


Scientific inquiry
The first prayer study in the modern era to use the clinical trial method was done by cardiologist Dr. Randolph Byrd and published in 1988. The results caused a stir. The study seemed to indicate that not only does God exist but that he had stepped in to help a group of heart patients.

During a 10-month period, 393 patients admitted to the coronary care unit at San Francisco General Medical Center were randomly assigned either to a group that received daily intercessory prayers from born-again Christians or to a control group that did not. Neither the patients nor the doctors knew who was in which group.

Byrd found that the prayed-for group had less congestive heart failure, required fewer antibiotics, needed less ventilator support and had fewer episodes of pneumonia and cardiac arrest. However, no significant differences were found between the control group and the prayed-for group in 20 other categories, including mortality rate.

"So it wasn't a slam dunk," said Anne Harrington, chairwoman of the history of science department at Harvard University. "But he pried the door open a little on the issue."

Larry Dossey, MD.
"Where Were the Doctors?
Torture and the Betrayal of Medicine"
EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing
Vol. 2, No. 6; November/December 2006
[link to www.dosseydossey.com]

This is the question Dr. Larry Dossey asked himself during his first year of medical practice. He had never had any sense of knowing the future when he experienced a week of premonitions about patients all of which came true. As a scientist and medical doctor he was taught that knowing the future wasn't possible. He was scared to talk about his premonitions because if he dared believe anything he was experiencing was possible—that the future could be known before it happened—then his entire education and worldview would be turned on its head. But as suddenly as the premonitions started, they stopped: "It was as if the universe, having delivered a message," writes Dossey in the Introduction, "hung up the phone. It was now my job to make sense of it — which I try to do in this book."