Prayer Doesn’t Help Health

Here’s one more thing we can add to the does-not-work-as-expected list of health tips. Prayer, it appears to scientists, has no therapeutic effect on the person being prayed for.
The Christian Science Monitor reports on the long-awaited results from the Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP), published online March 30 by the American Heart Journal. That study showed no positive effect from the use of third-party
intercessory prayer on behalf of patients undergoing a specific type of
heart surgery at six medical centers around the United States, when
compared with a control group who were not prayed for as part of the
study.
Wait: it gets worse.  The STEP study also found that patients who knew they were being prayed for had
more medical complications than another group who also had
received prayer but were uncertain as to whether they had or not.
Researchers, the story reports, had expected the reverse outcome. Read more about the study in the Christian Science Monitor.