A randomized controlled study showed that a short session of the Intercession Prayer may help relieve pain and anxiety in some patients, compared to listening to calming music.
The study, conducted at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, defines near intercession prayer as a direct prayer performed by a trained volunteer present at the patient's side for five minutes, and has been tested as non-pharmaceutical method within a primary healthcare setting.
The study included 180 patients from the university's family medicine clinic who were experiencing clinically significant pain (4 or higher on a scale of 10) or anxiety. After their medical visits, participants were randomly assigned to receive either a Christian intercessory prayer session or five minutes of calming music as a control group, with follow-up after two and six weeks.
The results showed that participants who received the prayer session felt a significant decrease in pain level immediately after the session, as well as after two weeks, compared to the music group, but this difference was no longer evident after six weeks.
As for anxiety, participants in the prayer group reported an immediate decrease in anxiety levels, and this improvement lasted for up to six weeks.
The study also showed that 97% of participants who received prayer intervention expressed acceptance or neutrality towards including this type of support within medical services in the future.
The results indicated that participants with dark skin showed greater improvement in pain and anxiety compared to others, which researchers see as important in the context of health disparities related to pain management and the use of complementary medicine.
The study reveals that prayer is one of the most widely used forms of complementary medicine in the United States, with approximately 43% of the population resorting to it. Despite this prevalence, rigorous clinical studies on the effects of direct intercessory prayer remain limited, making this study one of the earliest research attempts in this area within a primary care setting.
Dr. Catherine Jacobson, the lead researcher on the study, said that intercessory prayer was safe and acceptable, and could represent a low-cost option that could be added to traditional care, especially for disadvantaged groups.
Researcher Joshua W. Brown said the study's findings show that the effect of prayer intervention is not necessarily related to the patient's religious affiliation, noting that this type of intervention may affect brain functions in ways that require further research.
The researchers concluded their study by noting that the design of the experiment did not allow for concealing the nature of the intervention, which may make it difficult to separate the effect of prayer from other factors such as human interaction or the effect of expectations, stressing the need for more accurate future studies to isolate these factors.
