Research done by Harvard Medical School and five other U.S. medical centers shows that while prayer may give peace of mind to those who believe in its power, it doesn’t necessarily bring physical health and restoration to those being prayed for.

This study, which is the largest ever completed on the power of intercessory prayer in medical healing, found prayer did not produce the positive effects the researchers expected.

The efforts to interpret the information have garnered many results.

Chris Fung, MD, a retired Chicago pathologist, commented on one of the interpretations.

“Some members of the research team have speculated [though not in the article] that awareness of the special intercessory prayer for them may have caused ‘performance anxiety’ or a ‘fear that doctors expected the worst,’ i.e., ‘am I so sick that they had to call in a prayer team?'” he said.

Other interpretations recognized the results could be due to health concerns of patients in individual groups, not due to whether they received prayer.

Still, other explanations question the type of prayer received.

Authors of the study debated whether they could separate the effects of the study’s prayer versus “background prayer.”

John Kilner, a professor of bioethics at Trinity International University in Deerfield recognizes this.

“The study is helpful in demonstrating that it is harmful to do studies on prayer that involve telling patients that strangers are praying for them in order to test if prayer works,” Kilner said. “But it doesn’t demonstrate anything about the prayer that normally takes place when one who cares lifts a needy patient to God in prayer.”

Some individuals in the Christian world trying to interpret the results also hold the opinion prayer cannot be tested.

Pastor Marty Marks of the campus ministry at Immanuel Lutheran Church, 511 Russell Road, believes prayer is not a demand but a situation of trust.

“We are to trust that [God] will do what is best in the situation because, very likely, he knows more than us,” Marks said.

“We sometimes also confuse the issue by defining ‘what is best’ by our standards, not necessarily God’s,” he said.

While there are some trying to interpret the results and find reasons why the outcome is the way it is, others are not surprised by the results and didn’t expect prayer to play a positive role at all.

Rob Fantozzi, a freshman math education major, said he believes there is no point in measuring the power of prayer in medicine. Fantozzi feels prayer it is not something that can be proved.

“Since there is no way to prove that prayer does or doesn’t work, it seems hard to try to prove a point with this study,” he said.

Fung said although it is a difficult subject to study, and there are many variables involved, the scientific element was most likely the best it could be.

However, he would encourage those who would jump to conclusions based on the results to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

“To the skeptic, I would point to the limitations and to other studies on prayer that showed either a beneficial effect or no effect,” Fung said.

“This is the first study I know of that indicated harm. My hunch is that if more studies were done, and a meta-analysis could be done, i.e. a composite analysis of multiple studies, no benefit [of prayer] would be found.”