Sincerely I appreciate the reply from Breakthrough, I can see wholeheartedness and encouraging thoughts in it.
Let me prime a little bit more on this very question I brought about.
It was few months back, when I was still a busy medical student burying myself in piles of books preparing for exams.
While in one night, when I saw a HUGE acne grew right on my forehead, a thought raced through my mind: Why dont I pray for its healing? Even though I don't believe it will disappear out of nowhere, why not praying for an at least accelerated healing?
Then the question came. Can we or have we ever try accessing the effacacy of prayer?
Since the start of the year I ran the habit of reading weekly medical journals - just to update myself on the current state of the art management going through the field. Half of the contents are usually Randomised Controlled Trials. The prinicles of these trials are pretty much like the Controlled experiments we did in high school science, the difference being we try to recruit a certain number of individuals, and to eliminate their background differences - we randomise them into treatment group & control group. This virtually makes drugs (or prayer) being the only examinable component.
Of course I don't have the ability to run a large trial. I attempted to run a small Case-series on myself.
From Janurary onwards for 5 months, there were in total 8 ances grew on my face. Alternately I pray for them (sincerely), and jotted down their duration to heal. Here comes the result.
Days to heal for Prayed ances: 4,6,6,8, mean=6d
Days to heal for Unprayed acne : 5,6,5,5, mean=5.25d
This is a pretty retarded experiment - sample size is small (ances are uncommon entities to me, and I dare not to talk my roommate into the trial, he will definitely send me to psychiatry ward immediately, haha), and there is no definite objective measurable endpoints. Anyway, let's put these aside, at least from the results, I don't see drastic improvement.
This elementary work kicked off my passion on this very topic, and I shall come to it later.
Very interesting thoughts yet I would like to go one step further. Even it is statistically proved those who pray can recover better, is it really because of God or because of our faith/confidence instead?
回覆刪除Haha man you hit the point.
回覆刪除In fact what you are referring to is the "Placebo effect(安慰劑效應)", to eliminate it, we need to resort to more sophisticated study designs, such as "Double-blinded controlled trials". This type of study runs in a blinded manner, where neither the investigators or the patients know their group allocation (whether they are being prayed or not prayed).
Placebo effect is an intrinsic limitation of my acne case series, and i shall later share further on some carefully-performed trials in the west involving >1000 patients, studying the effacacy of prayer. Should be quite refreshing. =]