Prayer and the Placebo effect

A few weeks ago I was writing on my Jayarava Rave site about belief, and in particular about the significance of the placebo effect. A new report suggests that prayer by distant believers does not help, and in the case of the study in question the patients prayed for had worse complications than the control group!

I bet if they designed the study right it would show that prayer helps if: a. you believe in the power of prayer; and b. you believed you were being prayed for. All of which proves that prayer is powerful, but only if you believe it to be so.

Definitions of believe