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Prayer and Faith Healing In America
by Dr. Charlie Webb
| "Prayer is like a rocking chair," said Gypsy Rose Lee. "It'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere." Unless, of course, you happen to run a tax-free multimillion dollar "nonprofit" religious organization. |
Prayer can be many things. Like a rocking chair, prayer can be a form of meditation and a way of finding peace. It can be a warm expression of love, as in "we'll be praying for you." To the degree that it promotes a positive sense of well-being, prayer can be a very powerful placebo. |
For our ancestors, placebos (Latin for "I shall please," also known as "sugar pills") were virtually the only forms of treatment available for diseases until the advent of modern medicine. "Placebos" such as shamanic chanting, meditation, support groups, writing about stress, or even petting the family dog can generally improve outcome from illness by 20-30%. While this sounds impressive, we should remember that in the countless centuries when prayer, miracles, and placebos ruled, life expectancy in the Dark Ages was only 25-30 years. |
With the Enlightenment of the 1700's, scientific public health measures started to increase human survival. The churches frequently opposed such progress on the grounds that it thwarted God's "purpose," which apparently was to make us suffer and die at a young age. However, with the rise of science, life expectancy reached 40 years by 1870, and since then has nearly doubled to almost 80. Scientific medicine definitely works. |
From the miserable track record of prayer and placebos in the Dark Ages, it should be obvious that miracles and magic are simply products of ignorance and wishful thinking. Yet most of us continue to believe what we want to believe. Our self-deception is constantly reinforced by those who profit from our weakness: entertainers, news media, politicians, and preachers. No wonder the majority of Americans still believe in miracles, angels, devils, divine intervention, creationism, and other forms of superstition! |
Yet who even noticed the best and most scrupulous double-blind study ever done on prayer and medicine? In 2001 the Mayo Clinic studied intensive prayer for cardiac patients and concluded that "prayer had no significant effect on medical outcome." (Of course this is not exactly headline material for today's profiteers.) |
America is paradoxically the world's greatest scientific power and yet the industrialized world's most scientifically-illiterate people. Fully half of our citizens don't know how long it takes planet earth to circle the sun; this is roughly the same portion of Americans who believe that the world was created by magic just a few thousand years ago. The push to make this "one nation under God" is instead making America "one nation under-educated." We are gradually sliding into the backwaters of superstition. |
"As man's prayers are a disease of the will," warned Ralph Waldo Emerson, "so are his creeds a disease of the intellect." |
America, heal thyself! |
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