From: Eva-Lise Carlstrom (evalise@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue May 25 2004 - 14:56:34 MDT
Thanks for the links.
--- rhinoceros <rhinoceros@freemail.gr> wrote:
>
> [rhinoceros]
> A study from Columbia University was published 3
> years ago, claimed that prayer had a significant
> effect on pregnancy. It appeared in NYTimes, ABC
> News and many other places. Unfortunately, I was
> unable to find the initial announcement at Columbia
> University. References can still be found in sites
> dealing with "spiritual healing", the Templeton
> Foundation, and such.
>
>
>
http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/newsh/items/article/item_4020.html
>
> <begin quote>
> Any clergy person can tell you that couples
> struggling with infertility often turn to prayer, a
> practice that will no doubt continue as long as
> humans survive on the planet. The power of prayer to
> provide comfort and hope is unquestionable, but
> until recently medical researchers had not looked at
> whether there’s any evidence that prayer actually
> seems to help women get pregnant. In 1998, a group
> of doctors in the U.S. and Korea set out to correct
> that omission. Their results are striking — and what
> was almost as interesting as the huge success of
> this prayer study was the careful wording of the
> announcement from the Columbia University College of
> Physicians & Surgeons.
>
> Their data, published in September 2001’s Journal of
> Reproductive Medicine, is clear: women who were
> prayed for had a 50% pregnancy rate compared to a
> 26% rate for those who were not. Yet the researchers
> seemed more embarrassed than elated. Said the
> study’s lead author, Rogerio Lobo, M.D., Columbia’s
> chairman of obstetrics and gynecology, “We could
> have ignored the findings, but that would not help
> to advance the field. We are putting the results out
> there hoping to provoke discussion and see if
> anything can be learned from it.”
> <end quote>
>
>
> [rhinoceros]
> The latest Skeptic newsletter gives some interesting
> clarification.
>
>
> http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic05-25-04.html#6
>
> Prayer Study Flawed and Fraud
> Columbia University prayer study author pleads
> guilty to felony charges
>
> by Bruce L. Flamm, MD, Clinical Professor of
> Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of California,
> Irvine
>
> <snip>
> The following facts related to the Columbia
> University prayer study confirm that those
> physicians who doubted the study's astounding
> results had extremely good reasons to be skeptical.
> It will be interesting to see if ABC's Dr. Johnson,
> a medical doctor who also serves as an evangelical
> minister at the fundamentalist Community Covenant
> Church in West Peabody, Massachusetts, will report
> or ignore the following shocking information.
>
> The study's three authors were Kwang Cha, Rogerio
> Lobo, and Daniel Wirth. Dr. Cha, has left Columbia
> University and refuses to return phone calls or
> letters about the report. Dr. Rogerio Lobo,
> identified by the New York Times and ABC News as the
> report's lead author, now claims to have not been
> involved with the study until after its completion
> and to have provided only, "editorial assistance".
> Dr. Lobo also refuses to return phone calls or
> letters about the study. If the report's lead
> author did not conduct the international prayer
> study, who did'
>
> The remaining author is a mysterious individual
> known as Daniel Wirth. Mr. Wirth has no medical
> degree but does have a long history of publishing
> studies on mysterious supernatural or paranormal
> phenomena. Many of these studies originated from an
> entity called, "Healing Sciences Research
> International" an organization that Mr. Wirth
> supposedly headed. This entity's only known address
> was apparently a Post Office Box in Orinda
> California. Wirth holds an MS degree is in the
> dubious field of "parapsychology" and also has a law
> degree.
>
> In October 2002, Mr. Wirth, along with his former
> research associate Joseph Horvath also known as
> Joseph Hessler, was indicted by a federal grand
> jury. Both men were charged with bilking the
> troubled cable television provider Adelphia
> Communications Corporation out of $2.1 million by
> infiltrating the company, then having it pay for
> unauthorized consulting work. Police investigators
> discovered that Wirth is also known as John Wayne
> Truelove. FBI investigators revealed that Wirth
> first used the name of Truelove, a New York child
> who died at age 5 in 1959, to obtain a passport in
> the mid-1980's. Wirth and his accomplice were
> charged with 13 counts of mail fraud, 12 counts of
> interstate transportation of stolen money, making
> false statements on loan applications and five other
> counts of fraud. The federal grand jury concluded
> that the relationship between Wirth and Horvath
> extended back more than 20 years and involved more
> than $3.4 million in income and property obtained b!
> y using the names of children who died more than 40
> years ago.
>
> Incredibly, at the time of the indictment, Horvath
> was already in jail charged with arson for burning
> down his Pennsylvania house to collect insurance
> money. The FBI investigation revealed that Horvath
> had previously gone to prison after being convicted
> in a 1990 embezzlement and false identity case in
> California. Interestingly, the investigation also
> revealed that he had also once been arrested for
> posing as a doctor in California. It appears that
> the "doctor" who performed biopsies on human
> research subjects in Wirth's paranormal healing
> studies may have actually been Mr. Horvath
> impersonating a doctor. Horvath was a co-author on
> another of Wirth's bizarre studies in which
> salamander limbs were amputated and found to grow
> back more quickly when "healers" waived their hands
> over the wounds.
>
> Both Wirth and Horvath initially plead innocent to
> the felony charges and over the next 18 months their
> trial was delayed six times. However, on May 18,
> 2004, just as the criminal trial of the United
> States v. Wirth & Horvath was finally about to
> begin, both men pled guilty to conspiracy to commit
> mail fraud and conspiracy to commit bank fraud.
> Apparently a plea bargain had been made and many of
> the charges had been dropped. Wirth and Horvath will
> be sentenced in September and they each face a
> maximum of five years in federal prison.
>
> In summary, one of the authors of the Columbia
> University prayer study has left the University and
> refuses to comment, another now claims to have not
> actually participated in the study and also refuses
> to comment, and another is on his way to federal
> prison for fraud. Fraud is the operative word here.
> Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this entire
> sordid saga can be summed up in one question: How
> did a bizarre study claiming supernatural results
> end up in a peer-reviewed medical journal? We may
> never know because the editors of the Journal of
> Reproductive Medicine also refuse to answer calls or
> respond to letters about this study. Worse yet, the
> entire study remains posted on their internet site
> and the public has been given no reason to doubt its
> validity. It must be emphasized that, in the entire
> history of modern science, no claim of any type of
> supernatural phenomena has ever been replicated
> under controlled conditions. The importance of this
> fact can not be ov!
> er emphasized. One would think that medical journal
> editors would be keenly aware of this fact and
> therefore be highly skeptical of supernatural
> claims. In any case, the damage has been done. The
> fact that a "miracle cure" study was deemed to be
> suitable for publication in a scientific journal
> automatically enhanced the study's credibility. Not
> surprisingly, the news media quickly disseminated
> the miraculous results.
>
> In reality, the Columbia University prayer study was
> based on a bewildering study design and included
> many sources of error. I have already summarized
> many of the study's potential flaws in two critiques
> published in the Scientific Review of Alternative
> Medicine. But worse than flaws, in light of all of
> the shocking information presented above, one must
> consider the sad possibility that the Columbia
> prayer study may never have been conducted at all.
> It remains to be seen if the news media will find
> the above information to be newsworthy.
>
>
>
> ----
> This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus
> 2004 board on Church of Virus BBS.
>
<http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=61;action=display;threadid=30366>
> ---
> To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to
<http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/
--- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue May 25 2004 - 14:57:23 MDT