Pray for yourself and get healthy, but praying for someone else might kill them

[darkdan]

Time just published The Biology of Belief.  A very interesting article on religion, praying, and health.  It's been long known that prayer can help relieve stress and improve health.  Yet praying for others hasn't been shown to help (and sometimes the extra stress of knowing that people are praying can hurt).

The Biology of Belief

Interested excerpts.

Here's what's surprising: a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health. People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don't attend. People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God. No less a killer than AIDS will back off at least a bit when it's hit with a double-barreled blast of belief. "Even accounting for medications," says Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief, "spirituality predicts for better disease control." (Read "Finding God on YouTube.")

It's hard not to be impressed by findings like that, but a skeptic will say there's nothing remarkable — much less spiritual — about them. You live longer if you go to church because you're there for the cholesterol-screening drive and the visiting-nurse service. Your viral load goes down when you include spirituality in your fight against HIV because your levels of cortisol — a stress hormone — go down first. "Science doesn't deal in supernatural explanations," says Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. "Religion and science address different concerns."

Here's more evidence of the plasticity of the brain:

Pray and meditate enough and some changes in the brain become permanent. Long-term meditators — those with 15 years of practice or more — appear to have thicker frontal lobes than nonmeditators. People who describe themselves as highly spiritual tend to exhibit an asymmetry in the thalamus — a feature that other people can develop after just eight weeks of training in meditation skills. "It may be that some people have fundamental asymmetry [in the thalamus] to begin with," Newberg says, "and that leads them down this path, which changes the brain further."

Evidence praying for others doesn't work:

As long ago as 1872, Francis Galton, the man behind eugenics and fingerprinting, reckoned that monarchs should live longer than the rest of us, since millions of people pray for the health of their King or Queen every day. His research showed just the opposite — no surprise, perhaps, given the rich diet and extensive leisure that royal families enjoy. An oft discussed 1988 study by cardiologist Randolph Byrd of San Francisco General Hospital found that heart patients who were prayed for fared better than those who were not. But a larger study in 2005 by cardiologist Herbert Benson at Harvard University challenged that finding, reporting that complications occurred in 52% of heart-bypass patients who received intercessory prayer and 51% of those who didn't. Sloan says even attempting to find a scientific basis for a link between prayer and healing is a "fool's errand" — and for the most basic methodological reason. "It's impossible to know how much prayer is received," he says, "and since you don't know that, you can't determine dose."

Then there's the famous 1800 patient study done at the mayo:

Analyzing complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers found no differences between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.

In another of the study's findings, a significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain. The authors left open the possibility that this was a chance finding. But they said that being aware of the strangers' prayers also may have caused some of the patients a kind of performance anxiety.

This all fits perfectly with the evolutionary theory idea that religiosity increases an individuals and a small groups fitness by reducing stress and increasing harmony and group identification.

[SWM]

thanks for this well put together post, with some very interesting observations.

i suppose the conclusion of this is prayer is not a way to connect with some powerful being outside of the self but instead is a way to connect with the powerful being that is the self.

[Merana]

I'm not sure I can agree with this approach, it seems to take prayer from purely "scientific," almost atheistic view. To me, prayer is talking to God. It is about faith, too, and faith can be a difficult topic, even when you are a believer.

When you pray, do you believe you are talking to the living God? Or is it more of a "brain exercise," so to speak?

[liza123]

Well, I do not think that I would want to practise prayers to reduce stress, etc. For me, praying to GOD is a matter of faith and spirituality. Of course, you have faith in GOD, then, it does reduce stress. With regards to praying for other people, I do not practise such things...

[BlueChld]

I don't pray for other people either. And when I do pray, I believe that I am in communication with a higher consciousness that is constantly connected to me.

[Karaten]

Praying at best is a placebo effect,  and a placebo on yourself doesn't help others.

This doesn't support a personal higher power, it simply supports the falsity of praying in general and it's affects being equal to million other pointless placebos in the world.