Originally Posted by
Overkill
Speaking of everything being related to everything:
For my doctoral degree (which I never finished), I (we) was investigating the effect of distance, intercessory prayer on mental health outcome. (I realize discussion of religion is not permitted on this Forum. I hope me mentioning prayer in context of a bigger story doesn't ruffle any feathers.). Also, one could perhaps substitute "positive intent" for the word "prayer."
Anyway, the double-blind study failed to show statistical significance between the group of folks who were going to counseling and the group of folks who were going to counseling AND receiving the distant prayer, perhaps due to our small sample size. Anyway, out of the data emerged a moderate Cohen's d effect size for prayer, suggesting with more participants we may have achieved statistical significance.
Anyway, while reviewing the existing literature on the effectiveness of prayer, I came across a study I will try to summarize with accuracy. The study was retrospective in design. People prayed for people who YEARS PRIOR had been patients in a certain hospital. That subset of patients fared better than other of their peer patients in the hospital at the same time, suggesting prayer may (also) work BACKWARDS in time!!
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