Does prayer really work?
Tonight I went to the Christian Student Associacion, or youth group as I like to call it. The speaker was a lady called Þorbjörg who is a nurse. She told us about a research she'd done on the importance of faith when people get life threatening disease like cancer. It was really interesting.
What I found even more interesting was another research she told us about. It was a research done in the US somewhere, in a hospital. It is just too interesting not to tell you about it! It was on the effectiveness of prayer! I've never heard of anyone doing a research like that, have you?
This Christian researcher (don't remember if he was a doctor or not) had over a period of 10 months around 395 patients divided into two different groups,- done randomly by a computer. I think it was patients with serious cardiac problems. In one group there were 192 while there were 203 in the other one. One of the groups he had people praying for. People got a few first names and a short medical history with them to pray for. The other group didn't have any organised prayer for them. After the 10 months the results were gathered and it turned out that the group of patients that were prayed for were:
5 times less likely to need antibiotics - that would mean for example 3 people here against 15 people in the other group! Just to give you the idea ;) (in case math isn't your strongest side, haha)
3 times less likely of getting fluid in their lungs (very common after serious cardiac surgery)
12 people died in this group while 15 died in the other one
If this had been a research on some new medicine it would be concidered as a breakthrough! What does this tell you? Cool, huh?! I think so!!!
What I found even more interesting was another research she told us about. It was a research done in the US somewhere, in a hospital. It is just too interesting not to tell you about it! It was on the effectiveness of prayer! I've never heard of anyone doing a research like that, have you?
This Christian researcher (don't remember if he was a doctor or not) had over a period of 10 months around 395 patients divided into two different groups,- done randomly by a computer. I think it was patients with serious cardiac problems. In one group there were 192 while there were 203 in the other one. One of the groups he had people praying for. People got a few first names and a short medical history with them to pray for. The other group didn't have any organised prayer for them. After the 10 months the results were gathered and it turned out that the group of patients that were prayed for were:
5 times less likely to need antibiotics - that would mean for example 3 people here against 15 people in the other group! Just to give you the idea ;) (in case math isn't your strongest side, haha)
3 times less likely of getting fluid in their lungs (very common after serious cardiac surgery)
12 people died in this group while 15 died in the other one
If this had been a research on some new medicine it would be concidered as a breakthrough! What does this tell you? Cool, huh?! I think so!!!
posted by Katrín at 2/27/2005 12:44:00 AM
3 Comments:
Veistu hvað er fyndið?
Fyrirlesturinn sem ég hélt um daginn fjallaði einmitt um tölfræðiaðferðir sem athuga hvort kenningar úr nákvæmlega svona rannsóknum séu réttar.
Þakka annars fyrir skemmtilega kvöldstund - nú bíð ég bara eftir effbéinu :)
Haha! Já, feedback on it's way!
Skemmtileg tilviljun með fyrirlesturinn ;)
Takk sömuleiðis fyrir kvöldið. Rosalega gaman að hittast. Gerum bara allt of lítið af því.
parf ad athuga:)
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