Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on intercessory prayer is a recent attempt to scientifically investigate the health benefits of religious activity.In these studies, patients are randomly assigned to receive either standard care or standard care plus the prayers of distant intercessors.To date, the empirical results of trials remain conflicting.They have however, raised growing questions on the ethical and methodological basis of intercessory prayer as an "experimental drug".Many studies waive key precepts in the ethical conduct involving human subjects by specifically averting informed consent to avoid patient expectations that might provoke a psychosomatic 'placebo' response.This arguably overlooks the patient's spiritual autonomy and well-being.In addition, problems arise in identifying subject and control groups.Even if patients are matched based upon type and stage of disease, it is highly difficult to find equivalent groups based upon faith or "receptiveness" to healing by prayer.The laws of statistical reasoning caution that with enough outcomes measured, a statistically significant difference will arise by chance even when no real difference exists.This in turn raises the question of how "much" prayer is statistically significant.Can prayer be measured by time, the degree of sincerity or fervency?Does the faith tradition (e.g., Buddhism, Christianity, etc.) of the intercessor matter?The power of personal faith and its contribution to health and healing may be indisputable.However, debate over clinical trials of intercessory prayer raises questions on how to align such faith with the scientific method, or whether it is possible at all.Medical academians should therefore engage in critical bioethical evaluation and weigh arguments for and against such trials.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".