Recommended links; prayer research... I went googling for a non-polemic reasonably thorough overview of prayer-as-medical-procedure research that was not linked to any particular religious faith -- and didn't find it. But I found two items worth mentioning here...
1. There's a 2003 overview, with links to other materials -- including a link to what strikes me as a very useful annotated bibliography (PDF) -- at
http://www.acperesearch.net/nov03.html . Recommended.
2. There's an interview with Larry Dossey MD (one of the mass media celebrities on prayer as healing) at
http://www.vivendodaluz.com/EN/articles/healing_words.html . It has the most irritating graphic format for the questions asked that I've seen in many a long day, but if you can ignore that and focus on the answers it's reasonably informative. Sample:
"LARRY DOSSEY: One of the best-kept secrets I've come across in the past few years is an organization in Salem, Oregon called Spindrift. If you look up the term 'spindrift' in the dictionary it comes from an old Scottish word referring to the fuzzy spray where a wave breaks and meets the air. It's the interface between something ethereal and something concrete, which is how they chose the name. The people at Spindrift have performed experiments for over ten years, showing the ability of what they call 'prayer practitioners' to make a difference in what happens in the development and metabolism of extremely simple biological systems, such as sprouting seeds and yeast cultures. They have measured the amount of carbon dioxide a yeast culture gives off to determine how active it is. One reason they don't work with human beings is that plants are much simpler. You can count sprouting beans, and do it time and time again to see if it's replicable. Beans don't change as drastically as humans. It far easier to work with yeast, sprouting beans, wheat seeds and so on. So that's what they have done. They have gone beyond showing that prayer works, and have examined the issue of which prayer strategy works best. They have tested two. The first is a directed prayer strategy, where not only do you provide God, Goddess or the Absolute with the diagnosis of the problem, but you provide the treatment too. You say, 'John's got carcinoma of the lung, so make it go away.' Or 'Harry has a heart attack, we want to see it healed.' This is the kind of petitionary prayer most of us grow up thinking is the only klind of prayer there is. But then they tested what they call a nondirected prayer strategy, which is completely open ended, and does not attach a goal to the prayer."