Effect of prayers on healing

[Duty]

Hi all,

I came across this article:

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Which claims that a research that was done on the effect of prayers on patients healing (retroactively!) wasn't done properly. It claims that:

"Of course there are many problems with this paper... It appears that most of the significance of this study can be ascribed to one outlier in the control group, whose stay in the hospital was extended. However, without access to the raw data it is hard to prove this. The fact that the median does not differ between the two treatment groups is another hint, i.e. that the results might look very different when the outlier is removed"

I didn't understand what he means, because as far as I know Median, Upper quartile and Lower quartile are not affected by extreme values in the list. So even if there was a patient who stayed for a much longer time in the hospital, it shouldn't have change the results in the final table.

So, do you agree with the article's author claim, and if so why?

Thanks.

The median was the same, it was the mean average which was used to draw the EXTRAORDINARY conclusion/claim of the original study, and THAT value was thrown out by the outlier in the control group. That's my reading. 

Also, as Christopher Hitchens wrote: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - and ONE study, albeit published in a reputable journal, which has not been replicated AFAIK, does most certainly NOT qualify as extraordinary evidence.

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Ah, it all makes sense now - turns out that the "study" was a mere joke.

The British BMJ journal is known for an annual Christmas special issue filled with unusual articles. For example, two years ago they explored the question of Why Rudolph’s nose is red. One BMJ Christmas piece from 2001 caused quite a bit of controversy, however, and this paper forms the main topic of Ronagh and Souder's article. It was called Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection, by Israeli researcher Leonard Leibovici. He reported that prayer was able to help sick people - even backwards in time! Leibovici took some patients' medical records and prayed over them. A control group of patients got no prayers. Group assignment was randomized. The patients had been suffering from septicemia 4-6 years before; many of them were now dead. Leibovici reported that the prayer group had left hospital sooner and had had a lower duration of fever. So not only is prayer effective, it can actually change the past. Leibovici  that he did not personally take these results seriously. They were intended as a reductio ad absurdam of randomized controlled trials for impossible treatments:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/th...ke-science