[Edit: yeah, I know it's a gag study, but this analysis still stands. Even if the study had been performed it would have issues, and it is worth pointing those

[Edit: yeah, I know it's a gag study, but this analysis still stands. Even if the study had been performed it would have issues, and it is worth pointing those issues out.] I wonder if their p-values are Bonferroni corrected? That is, they ran three different experiments (that they reported on) and so the significance of their results should be concomitantly reduced. Consider: if you examined a hundred different outcome measures between control and treatment groups in any given study you would be almost certain to find at least one that by chance alone was different at a p=0.05 level. The Bonferroni correction (or some variant of it--there are numerous similar approaches that go by different names) adjusts for this. Failure to correct p-values for multiple experiments is one of the most common causes of spurious results in otherwise apparently well-designed studies. Furthermore, they don't actually include the raw data, don't give a detailed description of their method of analysis ("The χ2 test was used to test for the significance of the results shown in the tables. As most of the continuous variables did not have a normal distribution, the Wilcoxon rank sum test was used for comparisons" is no-where near sufficient for me to reproduce their results) and base their "fever" indicator on multiple measures of which they take one. Also, their control group has a maximum hospital stay of over twice that of their treatment group. How do the p-values vary if you look at large sub-sets of the data? That is, re-run the analysis with 10% of the data left out. Do the effects persist? This is a pretty routine test for robustness, and a claim with a prior as low as "Retroactive intersessory prayer is effective in reducing fever and hospital stay duration but not mortality" requires extremely compelling evidence to increase its plausibility to the point of being worth bothering with. Not only is the conclusion questionable on statistical grounds, but also on theological ones: why would one expect a loving god to intervene to shorten trivialities on hospital stays and fever duration, but not morality? The answer cannot be "God works in mysterious ways" because that completely obliterates any reason for believing that intersessory prayer will ever have any effect of any kind. It is equivalent to the claim that god is a black box that has a completely random and unpredictable response to stimuli (prayer) so we should study which stimuli have predictable outcomes.