From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Tue May 25 2004 - 07:03:00 MDT
[rhinoceros]
A study from Columbia University was published 3 years ago, claimed that prayer had a significant effect on pregnancy. It appeared in NYTimes, ABC News and many other places. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the initial announcement at Columbia University. References can still be found in sites dealing with "spiritual healing", the Templeton Foundation, and such.
http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/newsh/items/article/item_4020.html
<begin quote>
Any clergy person can tell you that couples struggling with infertility often turn to prayer, a practice that will no doubt continue as long as humans survive on the planet. The power of prayer to provide comfort and hope is unquestionable, but until recently medical researchers had not looked at whether there’s any evidence that prayer actually seems to help women get pregnant. In 1998, a group of doctors in the U.S. and Korea set out to correct that omission. Their results are striking — and what was almost as interesting as the huge success of this prayer study was the careful wording of the announcement from the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons.
Their data, published in September 2001’s Journal of Reproductive Medicine, is clear: women who were prayed for had a 50% pregnancy rate compared to a 26% rate for those who were not. Yet the researchers seemed more embarrassed than elated. Said the study’s lead author, Rogerio Lobo, M.D., Columbia’s chairman of obstetrics and gynecology, “We could have ignored the findings, but that would not help to advance the field. We are putting the results out there hoping to provoke discussion and see if anything can be learned from it.”
<end quote>
[rhinoceros]
The latest Skeptic newsletter gives some interesting clarification.
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic05-25-04.html#6
Prayer Study Flawed and Fraud
Columbia University prayer study author pleads guilty to felony charges
by Bruce L. Flamm, MD, Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of California, Irvine
<snip>
The following facts related to the Columbia University prayer study confirm that those physicians who doubted the study's astounding results had extremely good reasons to be skeptical. It will be interesting to see if ABC's Dr. Johnson, a medical doctor who also serves as an evangelical minister at the fundamentalist Community Covenant Church in West Peabody, Massachusetts, will report or ignore the following shocking information.
The study's three authors were Kwang Cha, Rogerio Lobo, and Daniel Wirth. Dr. Cha, has left Columbia University and refuses to return phone calls or letters about the report. Dr. Rogerio Lobo, identified by the New York Times and ABC News as the report's lead author, now claims to have not been involved with the study until after its completion and to have provided only, "editorial assistance". Dr. Lobo also refuses to return phone calls or letters about the study. If the report's lead author did not conduct the international prayer study, who did'
The remaining author is a mysterious individual known as Daniel Wirth. Mr. Wirth has no medical degree but does have a long history of publishing studies on mysterious supernatural or paranormal phenomena. Many of these studies originated from an entity called, "Healing Sciences Research International" an organization that Mr. Wirth supposedly headed. This entity's only known address was apparently a Post Office Box in Orinda California. Wirth holds an MS degree is in the dubious field of "parapsychology" and also has a law degree.
In October 2002, Mr. Wirth, along with his former research associate Joseph Horvath also known as Joseph Hessler, was indicted by a federal grand jury. Both men were charged with bilking the troubled cable television provider Adelphia Communications Corporation out of $2.1 million by infiltrating the company, then having it pay for unauthorized consulting work. Police investigators discovered that Wirth is also known as John Wayne Truelove. FBI investigators revealed that Wirth first used the name of Truelove, a New York child who died at age 5 in 1959, to obtain a passport in the mid-1980's. Wirth and his accomplice were charged with 13 counts of mail fraud, 12 counts of interstate transportation of stolen money, making false statements on loan applications and five other counts of fraud. The federal grand jury concluded that the relationship between Wirth and Horvath extended back more than 20 years and involved more than $3.4 million in income and property obtained by using the names of children who
died more than 40 years ago.
Incredibly, at the time of the indictment, Horvath was already in jail charged with arson for burning down his Pennsylvania house to collect insurance money. The FBI investigation revealed that Horvath had previously gone to prison after being convicted in a 1990 embezzlement and false identity case in California. Interestingly, the investigation also revealed that he had also once been arrested for posing as a doctor in California. It appears that the "doctor" who performed biopsies on human research subjects in Wirth's paranormal healing studies may have actually been Mr. Horvath impersonating a doctor. Horvath was a co-author on another of Wirth's bizarre studies in which salamander limbs were amputated and found to grow back more quickly when "healers" waived their hands over the wounds.
Both Wirth and Horvath initially plead innocent to the felony charges and over the next 18 months their trial was delayed six times. However, on May 18, 2004, just as the criminal trial of the United States v. Wirth & Horvath was finally about to begin, both men pled guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and conspiracy to commit bank fraud. Apparently a plea bargain had been made and many of the charges had been dropped. Wirth and Horvath will be sentenced in September and they each face a maximum of five years in federal prison.
In summary, one of the authors of the Columbia University prayer study has left the University and refuses to comment, another now claims to have not actually participated in the study and also refuses to comment, and another is on his way to federal prison for fraud. Fraud is the operative word here. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this entire sordid saga can be summed up in one question: How did a bizarre study claiming supernatural results end up in a peer-reviewed medical journal? We may never know because the editors of the Journal of Reproductive Medicine also refuse to answer calls or respond to letters about this study. Worse yet, the entire study remains posted on their internet site and the public has been given no reason to doubt its validity. It must be emphasized that, in the entire history of modern science, no claim of any type of supernatural phenomena has ever been replicated under controlled conditions. The importance of this fact can not be over emphasized. One would think th
at medical journal editors would be keenly aware of this fact and therefore be highly skeptical of supernatural claims. In any case, the damage has been done. The fact that a "miracle cure" study was deemed to be suitable for publication in a scientific journal automatically enhanced the study's credibility. Not surprisingly, the news media quickly disseminated the miraculous results.
In reality, the Columbia University prayer study was based on a bewildering study design and included many sources of error. I have already summarized many of the study's potential flaws in two critiques published in the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine. But worse than flaws, in light of all of the shocking information presented above, one must consider the sad possibility that the Columbia prayer study may never have been conducted at all. It remains to be seen if the news media will find the above information to be newsworthy.
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