Let Us Prey

I am always amazed at the capacity of people to misunderstand the most basic aspects of science. Imagine that you want to test, say, the efficacy of prayer on the sick. If you set up a test where sick people are prayed for, you can test if there is an effect or not. You can divide the sick people into groups, being careful to make the groups big enough that one or two individuals can't have too big an effect on the outcome. Then you have one group prayed for by people, and another group that isn't. A third group gets non-traditional therapy, like soothing music and images. A fourth group gets prayer plus the non-traditional stuff. Then you let 'em rip, and see what happens. Guess what? Someone did exactly this. They tested this method on 748 heart patients, and followed them for six months afterwards to see what ...