We don’t need placebos anymore, we have real medicine


Studies show that people who are being prayed for do not recover from illness or injury any faster than people who are not being prayed for.

UNLESS they KNOW that people are praying for them. Sometimes that leads to better outcomes, and sometimes it actually leads to marginally WORSE outcomes.

So prayer is indistinguishable from any other placebo. It may make people feel a little better because they believe it will make them feel better. And if they feel better, their immune system will respond differently, and their overall health will have a slightly better chance at improving.

The thing that actually helps here, when it helps at all, is the belief that it will help, coupled with the knowledge that friends and family care about the person and want the person to get better. Those things have real effects on health. But when people didn’t know they were being prayed for, there was no statistically significant benefit or drawback to prayer.

And you know what? Back in the Bronze Age when humans had no clue what germs were, no ability to combat them even if they’d known, no way to fight cancer, no way to deaden pain except by getting blackout drunk… back when there was no medicine, a placebo was the best shot they had at getting better. Something is always better than nothing, even when the something is still nothing but FEELS like something.

Same for every other problem that prayer has ever purported to address. We don’t need to pray for a good harvest; we need to compost and fertilize and check the soil pH and kill the pests and take care of the bees in order to get a good harvest. We don’t need to pray for mountains to be moved; we have dynamite and excavators to do that. We don’t need to pray for water in the desert; we can use plumbing to carry the water wherever it’s needed. We don’t have to pray for light in the darkness; we need only flip a switch. We don’t have to pray for people with behavioral problems that a god will change their hearts and make them more moral; we have medications that can change their brains and make them more functional. (Not always, to be sure; the science of psychiatry is still in its infancy. But we’re already far better at changing maladaptive behavior now than we were just a century ago, when the only tools we had were locking people up and asking our imaginary friend to cast out their imaginary friends.)

We have real solutions for problems now that our species has started to use reason instead of wishing to solve problems. And our solutions get better with every passing day. Prayer, meanwhile, will always be just as ineffective as it has always been. There’s no need for pretend solutions anymore, now that real solutions exist. We don’t need to take a placebo anymore, now that we have real medicine.

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