9 Comments

Prayer leads to higher risk of heart complications?

March 31, 2006 by in Random with 9 Comments

Time to put on your bible school thinking caps, CNN has the latest scoop on a research study regarding prayer and heart surgery:

In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

Having come from a religious private “religion oriented” high school, I can almost imagine the types of discussions that would have gone on had this topic arisen during religious class.


  • http://www.mgroves.com boohiss

    And there was a study before (I don’t know if it was heart patients or what) with the opposite results–people who were prayed for did better medically, even if they didn’t know they were being prayed for.

    But both studies are silly: Does this one prove that prayer doesn’t work? Does the previous one prove that it does? Do either of them take into account that an “answered prayer” might be answered with “no”?

  • http://haha.com jerry the dick

    can we say typo!!! heard complications!!! someone goofed

  • Justin

    religion oriented? does that me catholic? just a wild guess…

  • Carl

    Correlation is not causation.

  • Kyle

    Prayer isn’t a magic trick. Studies like this are absurd. You can’t put every prayer and every life on the same level. Each person’s situation is unique, prayers are unique and most importantly God’s response is unique. I bet most of these people don’t even believe in God but prayed out of desparation. Not to say that is a bad thing, but the point is prayer isn’t a magic trick that you pull out and wammo the person should be healed physically. I wish the study would have reported how many of these people actually felt comforted, were saved, who’s life turned around maybe not physically, but spiritually.

  • indoctrahol

    This article is a waste of space. Also one cannot judge a person’s complications as bad, or their recovery as good in all cases. Pray isn’t something that can be measured with tools. You can’t pour prayer into a beaker and decide what is more effective by the amount of ml it measures out to be. The general population need to realize this.

  • BroncoBash

    I think Ice cream is swell.

  • randall

    i would speculate that those being prayed for (and were later afflicted with complications) might have been a tad concerned that their situation was so dire that prayer was required. the last vestige of the damned.

    ‘how am i going to explain [insert guilt-ridden incident here] to saint peter!?’

  • gary mercer

    Talk about a bunch of gibberish. All these these so-called religions are man-made gibberish and don’t mean a thing. Join the freedom from religion foundation and find out how these so-called religions are using ” God” to take your money and molest your children. It is so silly to see so many people believing in false religions like Christianity, Islam and other voodoo religions. For agnostics like me, religion is seen a s crutch for people who are so weak that they can’t deal with the reality that they only have one lifetime to live on this planet, then they die and don’t come back. Too bad for them. They spend so much time planning for their life after death in heaven, and not enough time making the life that they have here, today meaningful. Sad for them. Too bad. When God, Jesus, Devil, Krishna, Vishnu, or any of the other thousands of manmade gods ever responds to my invite and answers me and has a conversation with me…..I’ll let you know. til then its all make believe.

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