A Test of the Healing Power Of Prayer

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

"Please surround Bruce Stephens with your loving, healing light. Thank you. Thy will be done. [signed] Mantra." Nurse-practitioner Suzanne Crater taps the SEND panel on her screen, and Bruce Stephens, being prepped for coronary angioplasty in the next room, receives another Duke service: prayer. Crater has entered Stephens' name with the Virtual Jerusalem website, which inserts prayers in that city's Western Wall. She will also e-mail or phone it to Buddhist monks in Nepal, a Carmelite convent near Baltimore, an interdenominational Christian prayer center in Missouri and several other congregations--all of which will entrust it further to some Higher Force. Only when the requests have gone out will Dr. Mitchell Krucoff insert a catheter, and eventually several buttressing stents (small mesh devices to prop open the vessel), into Stephens' coronary artery.

Today's cardio-spiritual activity may not be standard, but it flows from Duke research. Krucoff and Crater have already finished the first part of Mantra, a pilot study to determine, among other things, whether prayer by strangers might influence the medical outcomes of 30 patients in Krucoff's cath lab at the Durham VA hospital. The project, whose symbol is a valentine-style heart with an angel hovering near one lobe, is too small to be statistically meaningful, but the results--the outcomes of those prayed over were 50% to 100% better than those of a control group--were sufficient, as Krucoff puts it, to be "intriguing." He and Crater will present them at an American Heart Association meeting in November, and the duo hope to begin a full-bore, statistically powerful study next year. Meanwhile, for patients who want them, they see no reason why the intercessions should cease.

--By David Van Biema