According to a recently-released study, intercessory prayer doesn’t work. The post title is linked to the Slate.com story because it links to a bunch of other news stories (interesting for their commentary). The study itself is in the April issue of American Heart Journal. (This links to the editorial in the journal. The study itself is not available for free, but if it is worth $30 to you, you can get it here; it is fourth from the bottom.)
It’s an interesting topic to study, but wouldn’t the faith of those praying make a difference? How would you measure that to make sure those praying met the level of faith required? And what would be the level required? It seems there must also be a humility of “thy will be done†involved. In addition, the random prayer (in the sense that random people were assigned to pray for a random, unknown person, if I correctly understand what they did) seems almost pointless. Would you be able to have the faith that such a person would be healed? Would you really care that much?