Livin’ on a Prayer

By Rob Mitchum | 4.16.07

Last week, as you probably realized, was Holy Week, and my wife and I spent it in a region that gets seriously down for the Easter holiday: Mexico City. To our excitement, we scored a room right on the Zocalo, the enormous historical city plaza, with the Metropolitan Cathedral, the National Palace, Supreme Court, and City Hall right outside our window. We soon found that we had the perfect vantage point for outdoor Good Friday services (featuring ridiculously dangerous fireworks) and a surprisingly raucous Christian rock concert that started on Saturday afternoon. And kept going. And kept going. And ended somewhere around sunrise Easter morning.

Suffice it to say, not a lot of sleep was to be had that night. Yet, reading Bret Stetka’s article on psychoneuroimmunology upon our return, it struck me – despite all the sleep deprivation, and despite the ingestion of exotic foodstuffs from several highly questionable street stands, neither of us had experienced any of the gastrointestinal distress Mexico is known for. Could all of that praying and Jesus-music going on quite loudly outside our window have somehow warded off Montezuma’s Revenge from ruining our jaunt south of the border? Were we the unwitting beneficiaries of the crowd’s prayers to heal the sick of the world and protect the weak from harm, harm in this case being defined as E. coli? Time to slide down the fire-pole to the PubMedCave and find out!

As Bret details, the link between prayer and health benefits has been well studied and, to some extent, well established and accepted by the medical field, as indicated by the over 34,000 PubMed hits for the search term “prayer.” Correlations between prayer and improved clinical outlook and general health abound, as well as observations (albeit controversial) of reduced mental illness and increased success with in vitro fertilization. Many doctors obviously see no problem with prayer as a means of helping patients recover; after all, it doesn’t cost anything…yet.

But if prayer really does have a concrete effect upon the body, there has to be a mechanism, a biological process influenced by the act of kneeling, hand-folding, and asking for favors from the deity of one’s choice. The most promising avenue towards this somewhat elusive pursuit comes from a scientist named Herbert Benson, founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute (MBMI), who first described a physiological state known as the “relaxation response” in the mid-70s. RR is, basically, the opposite of stress, and serves as a catch-all for activities like yoga, meditation, and yes, prayer, that put the user into a state of mental repose. Relaxation response has been credited with a whole slew of health benefits, from effects as simple as decreased heart rate and blood pressure to more complex effects like aiding treatment of chronic pain, PMS, and infertility to truly bizarre observations, such as the link between meditation and cortical thickness.

Unlike most researchers trying to connect the dots between prayer (and its new-age hippie cousins) and health, Benson has spent his career attempting to find a mechanism that explains these effects, a hunt that has led him to some surprising biological signals. For one, the similarity of physiological effects induced by relaxation response and increased nitric oxide synthesis has led Benson to postulate that NO is a key mediator of meditation and prayer’s positive effects. Uncommented upon is the fact that Viagra also works by increasing nitric oxide production, suggesting a relationship between prayer and, er, stiffness that they certainly didn’t teach you in Sunday school. Nitric oxide, a strange messenger in that its gaseous form allows it to travel long distances in the body, works as a sort of adversary to cortisol, colloquially known as the stress hormone, and is responsible for a lot of the negative effects observed in tightly-wound people.

Even more scandalous is the MBMI’s current hypothesis that the link between brain function, where prayer and meditation presumably originate, and peripheral effects on blood pressure and whatnot, are the endocannabinoids. These weird little messengers, only recently characterized, are best known for being retrograde messengers, traveling backwards across synapses rather than forwards – okay, who am I kidding, they’re known because they get you high, maaaaan. Endocannabinoids are so named because they’re natural signals that hit the same receptors as the psychoactive ingredients in cannibis, aka marijuana, aka diggity-dank. Should a concrete link be proven between relaxation response and these chemicals (the jury’s still out), all those cheesy youth-group slogans about “Getting High on God!” may hold more truth than we supposed.

But the real faith-healing goldmine isn’t the benefits of praying for one’s own health; after all, such selfishness doesn’t jibe with traditional Christian values of charity and Good Samaritanism, and the concept of improving health via reducing stress or increasing un-stress isn’t really that groundbreaking. However, proving the biological value of intercessory prayer, or the concept of improving another person’s health by praying for them to get better, is taking holy power up a notch, implying that prayer can exert effects over large distances and amounts of time. The very notion is off-putting to most scientists, as it either implies a divine influence (and science most definitely does not want to go there) or a really elaborate, dangerously pseudo-scientific explanation involving equal parts telekinesis and quantum physics.

Nevertheless, a number of researchers aren’t discouraged by this resistance, with studies showing positive effects of intercessory prayer upon coronary illness, in vitro fertilization (again), and AIDS-related complications. Some researchers have even argued that “retroactive prayer,” the act of praying for a person’s health after they had left the hospital, can have beneficial effects upon health. As is customary for results that scientists are predisposed to skepticism about, these studies have come under significant return fire, with the usual complaints about statistics and experimental design duly registered. One particularly harsh paper goes to almost absurd lengths to dismiss even the possibility of properly studying the intercessory prayer phenomenon, to the point of using theoretical models and graphs in their comprehensive smackdown. Their argument is that prayer cannot be studied under the usual clinical trial design, given that the amount of prayer administered, unlike a drug, cannot be strictly controlled, as presumably most of the test subjects, including those in the control group, are being prayed for outside the parameters of the study by relatives, friends, church buddies, and so on. The combination of strange subject matter and ultra-serious methodological inquiry leads to some moments of unintentional hilarity, such as when the authors ponder whether prayer can be quantified or diluted. Do congregations (like our Mexican Christian-rock concert) that pray for “all the sick of the world” to get better dilute their intercessory prayer power, or is the effect of that prayer as strong as a wife praying four hours a day for her husband to recover from open heart surgery?

Undeterred by these seemingly irresolvable study design obstacles, our mind/body expert Benson recently attempted to run an extremely thorough and large clinical study examining intercessory prayer’s potential benefits. So strong was the design and execution of the study, it actually achieved publication in the American Heart Journal, ritzier surroundings than the kind of journals where prayer studies are usually printed. More than 1800 bypass surgery patients at six different hospitals were split into three groups: a group that knew they were being prayed for, and two groups that didn’t know if they were receiving prayer or not, one receiving prayer, and one receiving nothing (save the aforementioned confound of relatives and such). Participating churches received a daily fax with lists of initials of the people they were supposed to pray for, and were required to say a standardized, brief prayer for each subject. The result of all this intricate and careful scientific research? One significant effect was found: patients that knew they were being prayed for suffered more surgical complications than the other two groups. The most comprehensive examination of intercessory prayer’s healing power has managed to prove that having total strangers praying about your initials is actually detrimental to your wellbeing!

So chances are, my ability to ward off unpleasant digestive symptoms in Mexico had less to do with the virgin Guadalupe and more to do with brushing my teeth with bottled water. Nevertheless, these negative results should be taken with as much sodium chloride as those of studies which show a benefit of long-distance prayer healing, as it’s possible that the strict methodology of a well-run clinical study may have completely stripped all the power, mystical or quantum-physical, away from the act of prayer. The only thing Benson’s study may have proven is that intercessory prayer is just one of those things that can’t be studied with science, as no experimental design may be able to preserve the natural act while still providing a “treatment” controllable enough to test. In the end, it may not be a copout to say that the ability of prayer to heal the sick is truly a matter of faith. Praying for a loved one may actually improve health, though if you believe in its effects enough to reduce your own stress levels, the health you improve will probably be your own.

References

Benson, H, Greenwood MM, Klemchuk H. 1975. The relaxation response: psychophysiologic aspects and clinical applications. Int J Psychiatry Med 6(1-2):87-98.

Benson H, Dusek JA, Sherwood JB, et al. Study of the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: a multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer. Am Heart J. 151(4):934-42.

Bishop JP, Stenger VJ. 2004. Retroactive prayer: lots of history, not much mystery, and no science. BMJ 329(7480):1444-6.

Byrd RC. 1988. Positive therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer in a coronary care unit population. South Med J. 81(7):826-9.

Cha KY, Wirth DP. 2001. Does prayer influence the success of in vitro fertilization embryo transfer? Report of a masked, randomized tril. J Reprod Med. 46(9):781-7.

Dusek JA, Chang BH, Zaki J, et al. 2006. Association between oxygen consumption and nitric oxide production during the relaxation response. Med Sci Monit. 12(1): CR1-10.

Lazar SW, Kerr CE, Wasserman RH, et al. 2005. Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness. Neuroreport 16(17):1893-7.

Roush, W. 1997. Herbert Benson: mind-body maverick pushes the envelope. Science 276(5311):357-9.

Sicher F, Tarq E, Moore D 2nd, Smith HS. 1998. A randomized double-blind study of the effect of distant healing in a population with advanced AIDS. Report of a small scale study. West J Med. 169(6):356-63.

Sloan RP, Ramakrishnan R. 2006. Science, medicine, and intercessory prayer. Perspect Biol Med. 49(4):504-14.

Stefano GB, Esch T, Cadet P, Zhu W, Mantione K, Benson H. 2003. Endocannabinoids as autoregulatory signaling molecules: coupling to nitric oxide and a possible association with the relaxation response. Med Sci Monit. 9(4):RA63-75.