time isn’t linear
In July 2000, Israeli doctor Leonard Leibovici conducted a double-blind, randomized controlled trial involving 3,393 hospital patients, divided into a control group and an “intercession” group. He set out to see whether prayer could have an effect on their condition. Prayer experiments are great examples of mind affecting matter at a distance. But stay with me here, because everything is not always what it seems. Leibovici selected patients who had suffered sepsis (an infection) while hospitalized. He randomly designated half the patients to have prayers said for them, while the other half were not prayed for. He compared the results in three categories: how long fever lasted, length of hospital stay, and how many died as a result of the infection.
The prayed-for benefited from an earlier decrease in fever and a shorter hospitalization time; the difference in the number of deaths among the prayed-for and not-prayed-for groups was not statistically significant, although better in the prayed-for group. That’s a powerful demonstration of the benefits of prayer and how we can send an intention out into the quantum field through our thoughts and feelings. However, there’s one additional element to this story that you should know about.
Did it strike you as slightly odd that in July 2000, a hospital would have more than 3,000 cases of infection at once? Was it a very poorly sterilized place, or was some kind of contagion running rampant? Actually, those who were praying weren’t praying for patients who were infected in 2000. Instead, unbeknownst to them, they were praying for lists of people who had been in the hospital from 1990 to 1996—four to ten years prior to the experiment! The prayed-for patients actually got better during the 1990s from the experiment conducted years later. Let me say this another way: the patients who were prayed for in 2000 all showed measurable changes in health, but those changes took effect years before
Reference: Leibovici, Leonard, M.D., “Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial.” BMJ (British Medical Journal), vol. 323: 1450–1451 (22 December 2001