A Randomized, Controlled Trial of the Effects of Remote, Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients Admitted to the Coronary Care Unit

William Harris and colleagues' 1999 randomized controlled trial in the Archives of Internal Medicine on remote intercessory prayer is a peer reviewed clinical study. Its strength is that it is a larger, more carefully controlled trial than the earlier Byrd study of the same general question, published in a major medical journal. Its limit is that it reported an effect on a composite outcome score rather than on the individual clinical measures usually tracked, a design choice later commentators have questioned, and subsequent larger trials on intercessory prayer have generally found no effect.