Research Into And Explanations Of Psychic Healing

Question 1

Why do people believe in psychic healing?

Answer 1

Placebo effect:

• Psychic healing works in the same way as a placebo effect, in which it is not the special abilities of the healer but the mere fact that a patient believes that they’re receiving psychic healing that will improve their health.
• the belief may activate psychological and biological mechanisms in the body which can help the body to self-heal
• the persons state of mind is the real reason that psychic healing works

Coincidence:

• many ill patients receiving prayer sometimes recover unexpectedly even from extreme illness
• skeptics argue that the person would have been healed even if they weren’t receiving psychic healing, but it just happen to coincide with the prayer
• results in wrongly attributing the effects of psychic healing

Question 2

What did Byrd (1988) find?

Answer 2

He examined the effectiveness of intercession prayer on patients suffering from heart-related problems

Sample of 393 patients assigned into two groups.

1) 192 patients were receiving daily healing prayers by strangers with a strong Christian Faith - aiming for rapid recovery and the prevention of complications and death
1) Control group - no prayer

Double-blind procedure: participants and doctors weren’t aware of who was receiving prayer

Findings: group receiving prayers made greater recover and were less likely to suffer from medical complications compared to patients in the control group

Question 3

What does the Miracle study (2001) find? Cho/Wirth/Lobo

Answer 3

South Korean women were receiving IVF, were assigned to the study group to receive IVF plus prayer from Christian groups in the United States, Canada and Australia and there was also a control group

Found that pregnancy rate in the prayer group was almost twice as high (50%) as the pregnancy rate in the non-prayer group (26%)

Question 4

What does Masters et al (2006) find?

Answer 4

Meta-analysis of 14 prayer studies and found the combined effect of the studies was not significant

Prayer had no impact on health outcome

Research funds shouldn’t go into research into prayer, as waste of time due to ethical issues (lack of consent) and methodological issues (no true control group)

Can’t assure that patients in control groups aren’t receiving prayers from elsewhere

Question 5

Evaluating psychic healing

Answer 5

Age as a confounding variable in Byrd’s study:
* Found that the mean age of those who received prayer healing was found to be two years younger than that of control patients. This may explain why those in the prayer group recovered better

Methodological flaws of Byrd:
* lack of control - could not control the possibility of those in the control group receiving prayer by others, which affects validity as we could not ascertain if praying was the real reason for differences in health outcome

Research evidence support:
* Harris et al (1999) replicated and found a similar result to Byrd’s study

Unethical - miracle study:
* failed to obtain consent, neither the doctors or patients were told about the experiment

Dubious researchers:

• Wirth was sentenced to prison for five years for criminal fraud
• Lobo claimed to not even know of the study and had his name withdrawn
• Cha has been a plagiariser
• study could’ve been a hoax

Question 6

What does the term psychic healing mean?

Answer 6

A person who has the ability to heal people of health problems through their mind alone

Can be conducted from a distance (prayer from separate locations) or by being in close physical contact

Examples:
Faith healing
Therapeutic touch