SuperPray

Does prayer work?

Short answer: science cannot settle it, and the best trials found no measurable health effect from strangers praying. Below are the trials, including the ones that cut against us.

What the trials found

Researchers have run randomized trials of intercessory prayer, mostly with heart patients. Strangers prayed for one group and not the other, and doctors compared outcomes.

StudyPatientsResult
Byrd, 1988, Southern Medical Journal393The prayed-for group scored better on a combined severity score, and fewer needed ventilators or antibiotics. Critics noted the score was built after the data came in, and that deaths and length of stay did not differ.
Harris et al., 1999, Archives of Internal Medicine990A slightly better score on a new composite measure (p = .04). Length of stay did not differ.
Krucoff et al., 2005, The Lancet (MANTRA II)748No difference on the main outcome.
Benson et al., 2006, American Heart Journal (STEP)1,802No benefit. Patients who knew strangers were praying for them had more complications: 59% against 52%.

In 2009 the Cochrane Collaboration pooled ten trials with 7,646 patients and found no clear effect on death, recovery or readmission. The reviewers concluded that the evidence did not support a recommendation for or against intercessory prayer, and they doubted that more trials would be worth the money.

In 2001 the BMJ published a trial in which people prayed for patients whose hospital stays had already ended years earlier, and the prayed-for group had shorter fevers. The author, Leonard Leibovici, wrote it for the journal's Christmas issue to show how a study can look rigorous and still test something that makes no sense. Some readers cited it as proof anyway.

So it can't hurt?

We can't promise you that either. The STEP result above is the most careful data anyone has collected on what it means to know strangers are praying for you, and those patients did slightly worse. The researchers did not know why. One guess is that patients felt they must be sicker than they had been told. Other research finds that people who draw on their own faith to cope with stress tend to fare better emotionally, though those studies measure correlation, not cause.

If a vigil would make you anxious, please don't start one. If you are facing surgery or illness, keep following your doctors.

What science can and cannot test

A trial can measure whether a group of strangers' prayers changes heart surgery outcomes. It cannot measure whether God hears a prayer, answers it in ways no chart records, or answers "not this." Most believers never thought of prayer as a treatment in the first place. For them it is attention, gratitude, honesty about what they want, and a relationship.

People keep praying either way. Pew Research found in 2025 that 44% of American adults pray at least once a day. A 2010 national survey found that 87% of Americans had prayed for someone else's healing and 54% had asked others to pray for their own health.

Why we built SuperPray anyway

A daily prayer written for your situation does two things, whoever hears it. It names what you hope for and keeps it in front of you. It offers the words of your own tradition when you can't find any. If prayer reaches further than that, so much the better.

We will never tell you it is guaranteed to work.

Sources