Effect of prayers on healing

[CommonMan]

I thought that I came to a forum of a grown up men.

Grown up men.

Yeah, you're gonna be a hit around here...just the first of your bigotries to spill forth, no doubt.

Thanks for the warm welcome, so many good souls in this forum.

If you bothered to check the link that I gave, you would see that it's trying to debunk the prayers research. It's also clear from the quote in my post.

---

Hi all,

I came across this article:

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.

Welcome aboard.

You're asking if I agree with your claim, not the authors - to wit; that the author of the paper insists that extreme outliers don't tank the data set. Correct?

My question was: What's wrong with the statistic calculation in the prayers research. Because as you can see from the quote that I gave, the article's author (not the prayers research author) claims that there was a problem with the calculation.

I'm trying to understand what was the problem, it's a question about math and statistics.