Indian-American Physician launches study to find if prayers could heal Covid-19 patients
An Indian-American physician in Kansas City has begun a study to find if something called remote intercessory prayer might initiate God to heal those infected with the Coronavirus.
Dr. Dhanunjaya Lakkireddy launched the four-month prayer study on Friday, which involves 1,000 Coronavirus patients who are in intensive care.
In the study, none of the patients’ prescribed standard care will be changed. They will be divided in two groups of 500 each and prayers will be offered for one of the groups. Also, neither group will be informed about the prayers.
The four-month study will investigate the role of remote intercessory multi-denominational prayer on clinical outcomes in COVID-19 patients, according to a deion provided to the National Institutes of Health.
Half of the patients, randomly chosen, will receive a universal prayer offered in five denominational forms — Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism — while the other patients will constitute the control group.
All the patients will receive the standard of care prescribed by their medical providers and Dr Lakkireddy has assembled a steering committee of medical professionals to oversee the study. The investigators will assess how long the patients remain on ventilators, how many suffer from organ failure, how quickly they are released from intensive care and how many die, he said.
The physician said, he cannot explain how people praying remotely for someone they don’t know (or a group of people) could actually make a difference in their health outcomes and also acknowledged that some of his medical colleagues have had a mixed reaction to his study proposal.
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