A Prayer Before Dying

This begs all sorts of questions, which we will get to, but for the moment, consider the following:

The chance of this occurring randomly is less than 1 in 20, meaning it is statistically significant.

There was no placebo effect. For the patients, being less sick didn't correlate with believing they were being prayed for by the psychic healers. Not even close. Nearly 55 percent of both groups imagined or guessed or believed they were being prayed for - and they did no better than the others.

Targ had a pedigree. She graduated from Stanford Medical School, did her residency at UCLA, and, at the time of the study, was an assistant professor of psychiatry at UCSF.

The study, while controversial, eventually passed the scrutiny of peer review and was published by the Western Journal of Medicine.

Targ was news. She appeared on Good Morning America and Larry King Live and was written about in Time. She instantly became a star in the New Age community - not as famous as doctors Deepak Chopra, Andrew Weil, and Larry Dossey, but more respected because of her scientific rigor.

Although few doctors have read the study or know its details, it has achieved renown and is routinely cited - not as proof that prayer works, exactly, but as evidence that there's some connection between spirituality and healing.

The Various Questions This Begs

Is the "prayer effect" even theoretically possible?

Are these psychic healers who I think they are?

How did a reputable doctor come to risk her reputation studying the paranormal?

What could be more odds-defying than this?

Is This Even Theoretically Possible?

Targ refused to speculate. Her position: Use the scientific method to find out if an effect exists before trying to analyze how it works. For years, no one knew how morphine or aspirin worked - just that they were effective. The understanding came later.

She presented her data dozens of times at conferences but never offered a hypothesis. She enjoyed its mystique, its unknowable nature. Even in private, she almost never let herself be drawn into these discussions. Her coauthor on the study, Fred Sicher, a psychologist, is an enthusiastic believer in the prayer effect, and he would get into long arguments with their biostatistician, Dan Moore, who took the role of skeptic. Targ never joined in. Her boyfriend, Mark Comings, was a theoretical physicist. He felt that an eight-dimensional universe could explain how a healer in Santa Fe could influence a patient in San Francisco: In our ordinary three-dimensional world, healer and patient appear far apart, but in one of the as-yet-unmeasurable extra dimensions, they'd be in the same place. Targ would shake him off--speculation wasn't for her. She had patients to care for.

Although other people invoked her work as proof of God, Targ thought of it as proof of only one thing: that this should be studied more.

Who Are These Psychic Healers?

The usual wackos - but experienced wackos. On average, they had 17 years' experience, and each had treated more than a hundred patients from a distance. Many had graduated from a bioenergetic healing school on Long Island run by Barbara Brennan, a former NASA physicist. They had a variety of religious backgrounds, from Jewish to Christian to Buddhist to shamanist; however, their method of prayer was not an appeal to a higher power. Rather than ask God for help, the healers were directed to send positive healing energy, to direct an intention for health and well-being to the subject. The point was to test the ability of a person to affect another remotely, in a one-to-one relationship.

Wackos at the other end of the religious spectrum frequently interrupted Targ's speeches at conferences, sometimes by shouting vitriol, sometimes by asking accusatory questions. They would shadow her through restaurants, sit down at her dinner table, lecture her on how the power of faith is not to be subjected to the rigors of science, how God is not to be questioned. They were afraid she might succeed, and reduce their god to a physics phenomenon. They were equally afraid she might fail, and discover nothing's there.

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