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Charities Bill [Lords]

The question whether prayer has benefit in respect of medical treatment has been put to the test in a series of trials—of varying quality, it must be said—and the overall analysis is that there is no significant difference in the prayed-for group and the non-prayed-for group of patients recovering from an operation, regardless of whether they knew that they were being prayed for. If anything, there was a finding, which was not significant, that the prayed-for group did worse. So it can be tested objectively, and so far, at least in that field, there has been found to be no benefit to others, although of course it may help the pray-ers.