Complementary Alternative Cardiovascular Medicine

142 Alternative Cardiovascular Medicine
accompanied by insightful discussion. Byrd acknowledged that a limitation
of the study design was that it did not control for other prayer not
associated with the study. In other words, patients in both groups, their
friends, and family likely prayed for them during the course of the study,
and there was no attempt to prevent such activity or even account for it.
As such, the study was essentially examining only the role of “supplementary”
intercessory prayer. With this important observation, Byrd
defined the landscape of clinical trials of prayer where scientific study
could never expect to absolutely test the healing power of prayer. With
so much “ambient” and unaccounted-for prayer in cultures in the world,
the only appropriate query for a scientifically based hypothesis would be
as an assessment of incremental benefit from systematically added spiritual
interventions, with uncontrolled prayer activity adjusted for by the
use of prospectively designed, randomized treatment assignments.
The next trial that sought to define the effect of prayer on CCU patients
was published in 1999 (11). One thousand thirteen patients were randomized
to receive standard CCU care, with or without teams of intercessors
praying for them. Extending Byrd’s observations about the landscape of
clinical trials of healing prayer, Harris and colleagues were concerned
that the spiritual terrain of an intensive care unit would change if staff
and patients even knew a study was ongoing. That consideration was
taken to the institutional ethics board/review board at the Mid-America
Heart Institute, which granted permission for the study to go forward
without getting informed consent from patients and without the awareness
of staff.
In this study by Harris et al., teams of intercessors were given the first
name of the patient only, without knowledge of the type of illness or
severity of disease. They were instructed to pray for 28 d for “a speedy
recovery with no complications” and “anything else that seemed appropriate
to them” (11). The primary end point in this study was a predefined
CCU score that sought to quantify the severity of the illness, the hospital
course, and the procedures used.
The authors found an 11% reduction in the weighted CCU score (indicating
better outcome) in the 484 patients in the prayer treatment group,
as compared to the 529 in the control group. In an unweighted score,
which merely totaled the number of events, procedures, and prescriptions,
the prayer treatment group had 10% fewer elements. For both of
these comparisons the p value was 0.04, indicating a statistically significant
intervention benefit. Length of stay between the two groups was not
statistically different. Attempts to replicate the Byrd study’s findings in
CCU patients by using the “good” vs “bad” hospital score showed no
difference between the treatment and the control group. Like the Byrd