A Prayer Before Dying

All 10 who were prayed for were still alive.

THE FOLLOW-UP STUDY

A lot of studies had investigated the effect of prayer on healing, but they were methodologically sloppy and their findings couldn't be replicated. In July 1996, Targ began a confirmation study, one with a larger sample and a more exacting protocol. It is widely acknowledged as the most scientifically rigorous attempt ever to discover if prayer can heal.

By this time, triple-drug therapy for those with AIDS had begun, and quite miraculously AIDS patients stopped dying. So rather than just measuring mortality, the replication trial also tallied the occurrence of 23 AIDS-related illnesses that appeared during the six months of the study, from ulcers to encephalitis.

Forty patients were recruited. They filled out questionnaires, had photos taken, and signed consent forms that indicated they had a 50/50 chance of being prayed for by faraway psychic healers. They were free to pray for themselves and have family and friends pray for them as well - the trial design assumed everyone would get a "baseline" amount of prayer from loved ones. Their blood was drawn, and a computer matched them to a statistical twin - a counterpart with a similar CD4+ level, age, and number of previous AIDS-related complications. The computer randomly assigned one of each pair to a control group and the other to a treatment group.

The photos of those in the treatment group were sent to 40 healing practitioners, ranging from rabbis to Native American medicine men to bioenergetic psychics. These healers performed their rituals one hour a day for six consecutive days. Each week for 10 weeks they rotated, so each test-group patient received distant healing from 10 practitioners. The healers kept logs and were not paid. They never met the subjects in person.

The photos of the control group were kept in a locked drawer.

Six months later, the data was unblinded.

Continued on page 2: »