Among the basic human needs are biological, psychological, social, and spiritual needs. The latter have been forgotten in the framework of scientism, because spiritual experiences cannot be measured by the standard yardsticks of science. In this regard, science behaved like a fool, declaring everything that falls outside its laws to be obscurantism, superstition, and non-existence. Science has built its own little pens for psychology (even for dream interpretation) and sociology, but it has refused to study many phenomena that "are not within its competence" and therefore are not worth attention.
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Nevertheless, since the 1980s, the number of publications devoted to the connections between spirituality, religiosity, the practice of certain exercises, meditations, and rituals and health and illness has been rising steeply. These included observations of autonomic changes, changes in certain brain activities, or epidemiological studies. In recent years, the number of published works has been around 3,000 per year.
Meanwhile, the myth of the uniqueness of humans as self-aware beings—that is, beings with a clear consciousness of their individual existence and unique personality—has also fallen. It has been discovered that elephants and dolphins have the same consciousness and address each other by names. Behavior that could be called ritualistic has been observed in chimpanzees. It is becoming apparent that the brain, considered the center of consciousness, may not be the only one. The discovery of the gut microbiome is somewhat shifting the paradigms of neurophysiology. Brittle stars (Ophiocoma echinata) have no central nervous system whatsoever, and yet they are capable of learning. The memory of the body is slowly being discovered.
The people of the European continent have experienced extraordinarily generous prosperity, a rise in economic standards, and an apparent satiation of all needs, while spiritual needs have been neglected. The biblical saying holds true that one cannot serve both God and Mammon (1), with Mammon representing the idolatry of consumption.
The spiritual dimension appears not only among us much more powerfully in critical and distressing times; Newberg even felt that in the claustrophobic situation of CT and other examinations performed "in the tunnel," people prayed more intensely than during an EEG examination. I would also like to recall here the communal singing of the chorale Svatý Václave during the moving days, the joy from the canonization of the Czech figure Anežka, the visit of Pope John Paul II. On the other hand, Archbishop and Cardinal Duka, when he rode in a golden carriage, discouraged even those who had a positive attitude toward the church.
Why the church? Because until the 20th century, it was primarily Christian churches that satisfied spiritual needs. And it seems that only churches would be able to restore the satiation of spirituality on a broader scale. Attempts at spiritually fulfilling non-church communities (Freemasons) ended in elitism and in various—sometimes embarrassing, sometimes conspiratorial—speculations in public. The occasional gravity of sects appears ephemeral from the perspective of their viability, even when standing on strong economic pillars (Mormons and their social system).
Interest in prayer in healthcare is growing. Prayer is an activity related to spirituality and religion. Positive results regarding spirituality in health have been found. But the exact opposite has also been found. So let us begin with the worse news, brought by the repeatedly cited Harvard study from 2006 (5) focusing on patients after cardiac surgery. The fuzzy results of previous studies and inconsistent methodologies prompted researchers to conduct the largest and scientifically most rigorous study to date. It included 1,802 people who underwent coronary bypass surgery in six different hospitals from Oklahoma City to Boston.
Prayers offered by strangers did not reduce the health complications of major heart surgery. Not only that, but patients who knew that others were praying for them fared worse than those who did not receive such spiritual support, or who received it but did not know about it. (For me, a question arises here: how did this last part of the prayers exert a negative influence, through what pathways did the effort exerted by other people reach the patients' health status???)
"Doctors and healthcare providers want to understand whether prayer can be used as part of medical treatment," emphasizes one of the authors. "Could prayer, in addition to medications and other treatment procedures, be used in this example to reduce complications of coronary bypass?" The answer is clearly "no."
The study known as STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer) examined patients undergoing coronary artery bypass, an operation considered a commonly performed cardiac surgical procedure. Researchers enrolled the first patients in STEP in 1998. Data collection ended in 2001, and their analyses were completed in 2005. People of any faith or no faith could participate. Among those enrolled were Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and people with no religious affiliation.
The 1,802 participants were divided into three groups of approximately 600 each, with an average age of about 64 years. One group received no prayers. Patients in the second group were informed that they might or might not be prayed for. The third group was informed that other people would pray for them for 14 days starting the night before surgery. The prayers came from three Christian groups, two Catholic and one Protestant; other groups were not available. The intercessors recited a standard prayer "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications." This system provides a practical way of conducting the experiment, but limits the results to one type of prayer.
Various complications occurred during the surgeries, including 197 cardiac complications in the group that knew they were receiving prayers, compared to 187 and 158 in the remaining two groups. Additional complications occurred in 59 percent of those who were prayed for, compared to 51 percent of those who received no prayers, and 52 percent in the group that received prayers but did not know about it. Deaths within 30 days after surgery were similar across groups.
A possible conclusion from this study was summarized by the authors into a hypothesis: that patients who were informed that someone was praying for them perceived their condition as more serious and experienced greater stress and greater anxiety. This is a serious methodological flaw in the entire study, because at the outset the individual groups already have misleading information that can cause uncertainty. It is somewhat reminiscent of the well-known fable: You must not think of the tiger. Therefore, the results of the study are not entirely conclusive and are being challenged by further research.
Completely opposite results are brought by a later meta-analytic study aiming to examine the effects of prayer use on patient health (6). A systematic literature review was conducted in May 2015 and updated in November 2015. Electronic and international databases were searched, and inclusion criteria were based on PICOS: (Population) patients of any age and any clinical situation, (Intervention) all types of prayer, (Comparison) usual care, (Outcomes) any health change, (Study type) randomized clinical trials. No time frame or language restrictions were applied. A total of 92 papers were identified and 12 were included in the review. Prayer was considered a positive factor in seven studies, and several positive effects of prayer on health were identified: reduced anxiety in mothers of children with cancer; reduced levels of worry in participants who believe in the resolution of their problem; and provision of better physical functioning in patients who believe in prayer. Prayer is a non-pharmacological intervention and resource and should be included in holistic nursing care focused on patient well-being.
The Christian faith supports the idea that God is always at work in the world. God invites people to connect with him and then engage in his work. Three sisters report supernatural events where God acted in and through their nursing practice, thereby strengthening the understanding of what author Henry Blackaby calls experiencing God. The religious sisters were called to enter deeply into a relationship with God (7).
"There are a number of studies on intercessory prayer, or prayer offered on behalf of another person," said the second author of this work, Hodges, a leading expert on spirituality and religion. "Some have found positive results for prayer. Others have found no effect. Conducting a meta-analysis takes into account the entire body of empirical research on intercessory prayer. Using this procedure, we find that prayer offered for someone else yields positive results."
Roberts and colleagues (8) devoted their attention to "helping" prayers aimed at improving patient condition and searched the database of published works up to 2007. From the literature, they selected a total of ten reliable studies involving a total of 7,646 patients. The findings are inconclusive, and although some results of individual studies suggest a positive effect of intercessory prayer, most do not, and the evidence does not support a recommendation either for or against the use of intercessory prayer. The authors are not convinced that further studies of this intervention should be conducted, as they do not expect different results.
Perhaps the most comprehensive perspective is offered by Brandeis University sociologist Wendy Cadge in a review of her publication Prayer: A Social History (9). The text of the review was carried by Eurekalert, and I think it is reasonable to reprint it in full.
Waltham, Massachusetts – Health and religion have always been connected, most obviously through prayer for the sick. Does intercessory prayer for the sick actually help heal? For thousands of years, some people have believed so. But new Brandeis University research in the Journal of Religion this month shows that over the past four decades, medical studies of intercessory prayer—prayer by strangers at a distance—actually tell us more about the scientists conducting the studies than about the power of prayer to heal.
Intercessory prayer has been the subject of scientific investigation at least since the nineteenth century, when an English scientist, assuming that more prayers were said for the king than for others, tried to determine whether these prayers were answered. He concluded that they were not, but that prayer might be a comfort for the people who pray anyway.
After speaking with doctors who were wondering about the power of prayer to heal patients, Brandeis sociologist Wendy Cadge, an expert on the intersection of religion and medicine in contemporary American society, embarked on a study of the medical research on intercessory prayer dating back to 1965, the first year such studies were published in the English medical literature. This analysis in the Journal of Religion is the first to trace the social history of intercessory prayer studies and place them in their medical and religious context.
Cadge evaluated eighteen published studies on intercessory prayer conducted between 1965 and 2006. Together, the studies provide a fascinating snapshot of changing American religious demographics, evolving ideas about the relationship between religion and medical science, and the development of the clinical trial as the gold standard of biomedical research.
"I don't know why doctors and scientists conducted these studies," said Cadge, "but it seems that along with curiosity, personal religious beliefs played a role."
The earliest studies from the 1960s were based exclusively on Protestant prayers, while more recent studies, reflecting growing social awareness of other religions, combine Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and other prayers, Cadge found. Some studies suggested that prayer worked, while others claimed it did not.
The scientists leading the studies applied clinical scientific methodologies to the study of intercessory prayer, but Cadge found that even this approach is fraught with problems. Researchers asked, for example, whether people for whom intercessors do not pray are truly a control group, since their family members are likely praying for them. Researchers also asked what the correct "dose" of prayer would be, how prayers should be delivered, and what to do about non-Christian intercessors.
"Through double-blind clinical trials, scientists tried their best to study something that may be beyond the reach of their best tools," said Cadge, "and it reflects more about them and their assumptions than about whether prayer 'works.'"
I consider the publication of Magdalena Ježková's reflection, which allows us to delve deeply into subjective experiences and life transformations, a very valuable contribution to this constantly (and probably still for a long time) unwritten chapter of neurotheology.
Author: MUDr. Radkin Honzák psychiatrist 1 IKEM, Vídeňská 1958, 14000 Prague 4, currently without director under the protectorate of the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic 2 Remedis, Vladimírova 10, 14000, director MUDr. V. Řehák, CSc.
FOR FURTHER STUDY:
- Bible; Matthew 6:24-34.
- Newberg A, Waldman MR: How God changes your mind. Random House Publ., New York, 2008
- Newberg A: Neurotheology. Columbia Univ. Press, 2018
- Ameling A: Prayer: an ancient healing practice becomes new again. Holist Nurs Pract. 2000 Apr;14(3):40-8.
- Cromie WJ: Prayers don't help heart surgery patients. Some fare worse when prayed for. Harvard News Office, April 6, 2006
- Simao TP, et al: The Effect of Prayer on Patients' Health: Systematic Literature Review. Religions 7(2), January 2016, DOI:10.3390/rel7010011
- Simon EB, Hodges R, Schoonover-Shoffner K. Experiencing God in Nursing. J Christ Nurs. 2020 Apr/Jun;37(2):94-99.
- Roberts L, et al.: Intercessory prayer for the alleviation of ill health. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2009 Apr 15;2009(2):CD000368. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD000368.pub3.
- Eurekalert, NEWS RELEASE 17-JUN-2009. Wendy Cadge: Prayer: A Social History. New social history of prayer studies reveals growing religious diversity and declining faith in the science that measures prayer's value.
- Bremner RH, Koole SL, Bushmanet BJ: "Pray for Those Who Mistreat You": Effects of Prayer on Anger and Aggression. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2011; DOI: 10.1177/0146167211402215
- Lehak N, et al: Prayer and Mental Health in Later Life: The Role of Positive Emotions. Issues Ment Health Nurs. 2023 Jul;44(7):639-648
- Klitzman R: Typologies and Meanings of Prayer Among Patients. J Relig Health. 2022 Apr;61(2):1300-1317.