The Power of Prayer

Via Atrios (http://atrios.blogspot.com/)

Prayer works miracles, you know – that’s been scientifically proven!

Here’s what your Fundie neighbor down the street is talking about when he tells you so:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/health/10553703.htm?1c

It involves a blind study in which prayer groups prayed for Korean women who were undergoing fertility treatments.

The Korean women didn’t know they were being prayed for. The people doing the praying – so the study claimed – didn’t know the Korean women in question: they just had pictures of them. The women being prayed for got pregnant at a significantly higher rate than those not prayed for, yap yap yap, the control group got pregnant at the regular rate, this proves the power of prayer, and so forth.

Trouble is, the guy who set up these prayer groups? The only one who knows who was in these prayer groups and how often they prayed and if these prayer groups even actually existed?

Here’s the guy:

The third man is Capitola researcher Daniel P. Wirth. Federal court papers say he is a Santa Clara University law school graduate who is also known as John Wayne Truelove, Rudy Wirth and Rudolph Wirth. He was sentenced in November to five years in prison for embezzling more than $2 million from communications giant Adelphia. Now he is en route to a federal prison camp in Atwater, where he will be known as inmate No. 99442-111.
Wirth was the person entrusted with setting up the study's prayer groups. No one knows if he actually did, and Wirth did not respond to a Mercury News request for an interview.

``There is no reason to think that Mr. Wirth would have been motivated not to organize prayer groups when such groups are his area of interest,'' Cha wrote in his letter to the journal.

But others aren't so sure.

When Wirth was studying for his master's degree in parapsychology at John F. Kennedy University in Contra Costa County, his professor Jerry Solfvin was so impressed with him that he asked him to join his research team. Wirth went on to publish several studies on ``complementary healing therapies,'' including therapeutic touch and untraditional prayer.
But Solfvin, now an adjunct associate professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, said he had his doubts about the truthfulness of some of Wirth's earliest research long before the ``Miracle Study'' was ever released.

The other two researchers affiliated with the study have taken their names off it – don’t want to be associated with it anymore.

The journal that published the results is still standing stoutly by the article though.

Here’s why:

Journal of Reproductive Medicine editor Dr. Lawrence Devoe defended the publication of the study in an e-mail to the Mercury News.

``The journal specifically states in each issue that `the opinions and statements in this journal are those of the authors and are not attributable to the sponsor, publisher, editor or editorial board of the Journal of Reproductive Medicine,' '' he wrote.

``I do not know Mr. Wirth and am not prepared to comment on his problems,'' Devoe said. And, he added, ``There are no plans to retract the study at this time.''

So many questions remain about the research, its methodology and its authors that some experts say the study carries very little credence. Such uncertainty, they say, is bad for both the public and the scientific process.

``People desperately wanted this to be true,'' Flamm said. ``Wouldn't it be wonderful if it were?''

Yes, that’s right. To hell with reality. To hell with facts. Let’s just start inventing the truth, shall we?

After all, it worked for Bush.

So much less destructive than blow jobs.