From: Kharin (kharin@kharin.com)
Date: Fri Oct 24 2003 - 04:01:54 MDT
"The world's largest study into the effects of prayer on patients
undergoing heart surgery has found it appears to make no difference."
Interesting that even placebo effect possibilities are limited. That said, more pertinent is the possibility of adverse health implications from such activities as meditation. Here's one piece of reseach I found on the subject:
http://www.trancenet.org/research/toc.shtml
"It is not the task of this chapter to refer once again to the individual results tabulated in previous chapters. The summaries at the end of those chapters suffice in this regard. We rather wish to identify and interpret some basic structures of T.M.
The initiation into the practice of T.M. is geared towards increasing the emotional openness of the meditator. On the basis of this increased opening up, an unreserved acceptance of the teachings as spread by Maharishi follows.
The acceptance of these teachings causes a loss in the sense of reality, altered social attitudes, which themselves lead to a breaking off of or reduction in contacts to the world of non-meditators.
The 'one-to-one' type of relationship is replaced by a narcissistic ego-centric "me" type of relationship.
Negative experiences with the meditation are seen as "unstressing" and are blamed on earlier development (pre- T.M.) or on the negative karma of the meditator's surroundings.
The overcoming of these 'knots of stress" leads to more intensive meditation and increased isolation. "
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