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suggests that meditation by a critical number of people may be able to calm the minds of others in the local geographic vicinity. Isn't that a hopeful thought?
Successful Healing Prayer in a Hospital
In 1983, physician Randolph Byrd carried out a large clinical experiment at San Francisco General Hospital to test the efficacy of prayer for healing. 42 Over a period of 10 months, he studied the effects of intercessory or helpful prayer on 393 patients hospitalized with heart disease. Byrd's study showed that the patients who had received prayer experienced fewer medical complications, including a lower incidence of pneumonia. The prayed-for group also required significantly less ventilatory assistance, and fewer antibiotics and diuretics, than did the patients who had received no intercessory prayer.
This study illustrates how difficult it is to separate distant healing effects from outcomes that may be due to other causes. For instance, the research did not include any method of determining whether the people who were assigned to pray actually did pray, or if the people who got better had better coping styles, or other psychological characteristics that would account for their improvement. On the other hand, the control group may also have received helpful healing prayers from friends or family members, which could have masked an even greater distant healing effect.
We recognize that there is no perfect research: It is always possible to criticize a study after the fact. We feel that in this work, however, the principle variables have been well balanced between the prayed-for and the control group. This pioneering investigation by a courageous researcher will go down in history as a landmark study. The apparent effectiveness of healing prayer as demonstrated in this experiment would be advertised on television, just like Bufferin and Excedrin, if prayers were a profit-making drug.
Distant Psychic Healing in Israel
In Israel, Zvi Bentwich and Shulamith Kreitler reported research in 1994 indicating that patients in Kaplan Hospital who received distant healing

 
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