The most famous prayer study was conducted by Dr. Randolph Byrd, a cardiologist at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center. He took 393 people who had been admitted to the hospital with a heart attack. All of the subjects received the same high-tech, state-of-the-art coronary care, but half were also prayed for by name by prayer groups around the country. No one knew who was being prayed for--the patients, the doctors, the nurses. The prayed-for group had fewer deaths, faster recovery, less intubations, and used fewer potent medications.
If the subject of this study had been a new medication instead of prayer, this would have been considered a medical breaththrough. Up until then, most medical people had considered prayer a nice thing. It didn't hurt much, but they certainly didn't consider it a matter of life and death.
One of the complaints about Byrd's and others' studies is that they are not rigorously done. In writing my books I looked at all of the studies, some 160 of them. While it is true that some have problems, many are fanatically precise and admirably designed. Two-thirds show that the impact of distant prayer is statistically significant.
Some scientists have talked of the "problem of extraneous prayer." How do we know that those cardiac patients in the control group weren't being prayed for by friends and family? People often pray in a crisis. Now, I for one am glad that this problem of extraneous prayer exists. If I have a heart attack, I want to have a lot of this problem! But for research purposes, scientists have gotten around this by doing studies of the growth of bacteria in test tubes. That way you guarantee the purity of the control group. And you know what? The prayed-for test tube also shows a reduction in the growth of bacteria. This kind of study might seem outrageous but this is where precise science can be done.
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