October 29, 2001
Biology
Or Faith?
“Prayer seems to almost double the success rate of in vitro fertilization procedures that lead to pregnancy, according to surprising results from a study carefully designed to eliminate bias.”
Excerpt
from an article in Columbia News by Robin Eisner
The radio in my car is almost always on whether I am
intently listening or not. I switch
back and forth between music of various types and talk or news stations.
About a week ago I caught just a
sound bite of what I think was a Paul Harvey report. It involved Columbia University of New York and their school
of medicine and a study they had just released regarding prayer and pregnancy.
Being the cyber-sleuth that I have become, I made a mental note to see if
I could find out a little more about the university’s study.
Within a few minutes of
searching their site using the key word “prayer”, I found the entry I had
heard about a few days prior. It
was among several hundred matches on the subject.
The title of the article was, Prayer May Influence In Vitro
Fertilization Success (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/01/09/in_vitro_prayer.html).
It outlined the findings of a study the university had conducted between
December 1998 and March of 1999 where 199 women in Seoul, Korea were undergoing
in vitro fertilization. Half were
prayed for by a group of women who lived in the United States, Canada, and
Australia.
Revealing that the group of
women who had people praying for them had a 50 percent pregnancy rate compared
to a 26 percent rate in the group who were not prayed for, Dr. Rogerio Lobo,
chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University’s College of
Physicians & Surgeons, stated, “We could have ignored the findings, but
that would not help to advance the field… We would like to understand the
biological or other phenomena that led to this almost doubling of the pregnancy
rate.”
It appears that this study, done
several years ago, was finally made public in part because “unknown biological
factors may be playing a role in the difference between the two groups,”
according to the article. To me
this means that perhaps the study was done to demonstrate that prayer had no
effect on the body. When the
results supported the power of prayer, the researchers, at least on the surface,
held off on the announced results until they exhausted the biological
explanations they could conceive of. This
begs the question, had the results been the opposite, showing prayer had little
effect on the outcome, would the report have been released much sooner?
This is yet another example of a
group of people who seem to need proof of the existence of a higher power.
To be honest, no matter how strong my faith is, there is a tiny part of
me that would love to have some physical evidence of God’s existence for those
who cannot move beyond the tangible to the spiritual.
But as this article reminds me, even with results such as the ones
reported, there are those who still want to find a “logical” or
non-spiritual explanation. This is difficult to understand because in my world, the
logical explanation for almost everything I encounter is spiritual.
As we travel along a spiritual
path, we will be challenged to look at our faith. When reading an article such as this, do we think it
reinforces our own belief in the power of prayer, or do we laugh and think of
course this would be the result because we know the power of
prayer? A subtle difference, but an
interesting one to contemplate.
With respect, acceptance, and love,
© Richard D.
Olson and Awaken The Soul, 2001; Edited by Janice E. Olson