Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population

Back in 1988, a cardiologist ran what became a famous (and famously controversial) experiment: could strangers praying for hospital patients actually help them get better? Nearly 400 patients in a San Francisco coronary care unit were randomly split into two groups. One group had born-again Christians praying for them daily — three to seven pray-ers per patient — while the other group got standard care with no organized prayer. Nobody involved, not the patients or their doctors, knew who was in which group. The results were genuinely striking. Patients in the prayer group had significantly fewer serious complications across the board — less heart failure, less pneumonia, fewer cardiac arrests, and dramatically less need for breathing tubes and medications like antibiotics and diuretics. Statistically, the differences were strong. A combined severity score showed 85% of the prayer group had good outcomes versus 73% of controls. Interestingly, though, there was no difference in who actually died. This study became a lightning rod. It launched an entire modern debate about whether distant prayer can heal, directly inspiring major follow-up studies in 1999 and 2006. Supporters held it up as real evidence for prayer's power. Critics, however, pointed out that the researchers tested a whole bunch of outcomes at once (which inflates the chance of finding something just by luck) and that the severity scoring system was created after the data was already in — a statistical no-no that makes findings less trustworthy.