Praying Online Helps Cancer Patients, Study Suggests
Breast cancer patients who pray in online support groups can obtain mental health benefits, according to a new study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research that was funded by the National Cancer Institute.
"We know that many cancer patients pray in online support groups to help them cope with their illness. This is the first study we are aware of that examines the psychological effects of this behavior," says Bret Shaw, an associate scientist in UW-Madison's College of Engineering and lead author of the study.
The analysis was conducted on message transcripts from 97 breast cancer patients participating in an online support group that was integrated with the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS) "Living with Breast Cancer" program, a computer-based health education and support system. The patients were recruited from Wisconsin and Michigan.
Surveys were administered before group access, then again four months later. Text messages within the computer-mediated support groups were analyzed using a text analysis program, which measured the percentage of words that were suggestive of religious belief and practice (e.g., pray, worship, faith, holy, God). Writing a higher percentage of these religious words within the online support groups was associated with lower levels of negative emotions and higher levels of self-efficacy and functional well-being, even after controlling for patients' pre-test levels of religious beliefs.
I'll try to remember this so, if I need to, I can go online and type somthing about Satan worship, faith healer, birds of pray, holy sh*t, and God damn it!
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If they'd done more house work, instead of hanging out in chat rooms, they wouldn't have got the cancer in the first place.
Hopefully someone with access and the knowledge can review this one - I doubt I know enough to analyze it. I'd like to see their methodology and how they came up with the results they did, and see how much screening out of other factors - ah hell, the whole ball of wax really. Did they really correlate the use of words like "pray" and assume that made a difference? Shoot, go to Internet Infidels and you'll see a lot of those words, and very few in a favorable context. The more I think about it, the more I want to see this one, even if I can't figure it out.
John McKay - No, I don't think so... It is clearly stated in the Bible that Adam and Eve caused human cancer and all other diseases by eating the forbidden fruit. God is evidently still one pissed-off mother, and still taking it out on us for Adam and Eve's transgression. Maybe we got the wrong "Son-Of-God" earlier, and we need to crucify someone else to die for our sins, cuz the first one didn't work. Does anybody have the receipt for another after X-mas return?
You don't even need a degree in epidemiology to see how bogus this test was. There was no placebo control, the test WAS the placebo.
"associated with lower levels of negative emotions and higher levels of self-efficacy and functional well-being, even after controlling for patients' pre-test levels of religious beliefs."
What kind of test is that? It's a questionnaire, where they don't care whether people actually get better only that they feel more positive about not getting better. Wouldn't marijuana do a better job of that?
Seems like positive energy working for them,interesting
breast cancer treatment wonder how much this would cost,pretty cheap sounding