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Matter of the heart
AILMENT WOES It takes more than prayer to heal a heart
Prayer from a distance — whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist — did not significantly improve the outcome for common elective cardiac procedures performed on a group 737 patients, a new study reports. The research, published in Lancet, also examined the effectiveness of bedside music, imagery and MIT therapy, a touching technique that was found effective by some measures.
Half of the study participants were randomly assigned to a group that was prayed for, and half to a group that was not prayed for. In addition, half were assigned to MIT therapy and half were given standard care. Neither prayer nor MIT therapy nor the two together were effective in reducing the number of deaths in the hospital, cardiovascular problems that emerged or hospital readmissions. But the group that received MIT therapy did have less emotional distress before the procedure and a slightly lower mortality rate six months later.
Dr. Mitchell W. Krucoff, a professor of medicine at Duke and the lead author on the study, believes that reducing stress before a medical procedure may have significant clinical benefits. Dr. Krucoff said the results did not mean that prayer failed. "The most important point may be that this is an exploration coming from the mainstream, not the fringes, of modern medicine," he said.
"We definitely think there are important reasons to believe that what a community does at a distance or what a loved one does at the bedside prior to a procedure may belong in the systematic armamentarium of high-tech medical care."
New York Times
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