RE: Does Prayer Really Work? Does God Even Care?
August 17, 2014 at 8:30 am
(This post was last modified: August 17, 2014 at 8:33 am by Michael.)
Thump, with respect I have to correct that. The control you pick depends on the question you are asking. For example, I'm a biomedical researcher, so I have frequently been involved in trials on the efficacy of medicines. If we're looking at whether a new asthma drug works or not, we take a group of asthmatics (and only asthmatics for efficacy trials; there is little sense in including healthy people in a test of efficacy against a particular condition) and we compare our new treatment with either another treatment (European authorities prefer comparisons against commonly used standard treatments) or with placebo (US authorities prefer placebo-controlled trials).
So a control is always specific to the question asked. In the study reported the control is a group who think about a person. The experiment then reports on the difference between test (prayer) and control (thinking about a person). We don't want to introduce different groups of people as that will confuse the results (just as we don't want to test an asthma drug in asthmatics vs a placebo in healthy people). We must then, of course, be very careful only to draw conclusion as far as the test allows. This study simply demonstrated a difference between general thought about a person and prayer. So long as we limit the conclusions to the remit if the experiment I think it's a useful experiment. Most experiments have tightly focussed aims like this. They may not seem to add much, but knowledge is often built from lots of little studies.
So a control is always specific to the question asked. In the study reported the control is a group who think about a person. The experiment then reports on the difference between test (prayer) and control (thinking about a person). We don't want to introduce different groups of people as that will confuse the results (just as we don't want to test an asthma drug in asthmatics vs a placebo in healthy people). We must then, of course, be very careful only to draw conclusion as far as the test allows. This study simply demonstrated a difference between general thought about a person and prayer. So long as we limit the conclusions to the remit if the experiment I think it's a useful experiment. Most experiments have tightly focussed aims like this. They may not seem to add much, but knowledge is often built from lots of little studies.
