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Tuesday, June 08, 2004
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Intercessional Insemination at Columbia University
Wow! Psychology Today excitedly revealed, back in 2002, the results of a Columbia University study which showed that if people pray for infertile women undergoing in vitro treatment, the women they pray for double their chances of getting pregnant. “Women who were prayed for had a 50 percent pregnancy rate, compared with a 26 percent success rate among those for whom no one prayed.” We’re not talking here about your local priest or your canasta partner kneeling in the neighborhood church -- in this “amazing” study, total strangers thousands of miles away from the Korean women involved (none of the women were told they were experimental subjects) prayed to anonymous photos of them…. And that wasn’t all! “Instead of merely having a group of people pray for the women attempting to get pregnant,” a scientist who reviewed the experiment remarked, “the study had one group doing that, a second group praying to help the first group, and a third group praying that ‘God's will or desire be fulfilled for the prayer participants’ in the first two groups.” Kind of a chain letter thing. This impressive protocol and its stunning results blew Roger [sometimes rendered Rogerio] Lobo, chair of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, right out of the uterine sac. “The results were so highly significant they weren’t even borderline. We spent time deciding if it was even publishable because we couldn’t explain it.” But publish it they did, in the eminent Journal of Reproductive Medicine, and there it sat amid swelling media coverage, until various scientific oversight agencies took a look at it. At which point the swelling went down. Efforts to talk to the three principals about it have not gone well. “One of the authors,” writes an observer, “has left the university and refuses to comment, another now claims to have not actually participated in the study and also refuses to comment [that‘d be Lobo, who now says he just put his name on the study -- a common and scandalous scientific practice that no one finds scandalous], and another is on his way to federal prison for fraud.” That'd be veteran conman Daniel P. Wirth, about to spend five years in jail for too many crimes to mention here. Wirth has no medical degree, but did purchase a diploma mill masters in parapsychology, spiritual healing, and therapeutic touch. Before the pregnancy study, Wirth’s research involved amputating salamander limbs and then waving his hands over the salamanders to make their limbs grow back. Dr. Lobo was “very well respected” before the paper came out, commented one reviewer. “How he got hooked into this is a mystery.” To which I can only reply by quoting Madonna’s song, “Like a Prayer” -- Life is a mystery… Just like a prayer, your voice can take me there Just like a muse to me, you are a mystery Just like a dream, you are not what you seem... |