Commentary on "experiments on distant intercessory prayer" in archives of internal medicine

Journal of Parapsychology, The, June, 2002 by J.E. Kennedy

In a section on Statistical and Measurement Issues, Chibnall et al. brought these issues down to a technical level. For example, what is the null hypothesis in this research? They proposed that it is "Assuming that God cannot heal at the bequest of human intercessors, what is the probability of getting these results?" (p. 2533). Again the testing of God is prominent. Further, they pointed out, "It makes no sense to conduct a power analysis and set the alpha to a certain level if the laws of probability can be rescinded at any time" (p. 2533).

In a related point, they raised the question of why weak statistical effects are found in this research instead of striking nonstatistical beneficial effects from the supernatural power. For example, the results of the study by Harris et al. (1999) were p = .04 with 990 patients. The value and divine purpose for such a weak effect is highly questionable. Chibnall et al. suggested that the existing results may be due to the methodological "crud factor." Many of these studies had numerous outcome measures with only a few measures showing any possible effects. For example, Byrd's (1988) study had 29 Outcome measures, and Harris et al.'s (1999) study had 35. Correction for multiple analyses and data fishing is always a problem under these circumstances. Chibnall et al. suggested that the many outcome variables indicate that these studies were exploratory rather than well formulated.

In statements that perhaps summarize their overall position, Chibnall et al. wrote: "Science does not deny God, miracles, and the like, it merely neglects them....Science cannot actualize our spirituality, so why do we ask this of it?" (p. 2535).

COMMENTS

From the perspective of parapsychology, the main theme of Chibnall et al.'s article is addressing the same issues that occur with the study of survival of death. Attempts to investigate God and attempts to investigate spirit survival both try to infer the presence of nonphysical entities from observations of physical events or reports of mental events. However, the results could be produced by psi from the people in the study. Very difficult problems result from attempts to justify a hypothesis that is not the most parsimonious explanation for the data. It is likely that future discussions of distant healing research will be conceptualized more in terms of psi rather than prayer.

Conceptualizing the results as psi is more scientifically testable, but many of the problematic issues remain. There is still a background effort and motivation for paranormal healing that must be considered. Problems in specifying how the healing effect is guided also remain. Identifying the source and mechanism of psi are pervasive problems, with experimenter effects perhaps providing the most parsimonious explanation and the clearest motivation for distinguishing the treatment and control groups in healing studies. In a related issue, the characterization of effective psi efforts (duration of effort, number of people, people with special abilities, etc.) remains a dilemma with significant ethical implications in healing research. At a minimum, cautions about the limitations of exploratory research findings should be prominently discussed to reduce the potential misuse of the findings.