Fly in my Science

Can Prayer Cure Cancer?

SMH, via AAP, have a brief article which indicates that Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Cardinal George Pell believes that prayer can cure cancer.

“Yes obviously (cancer can be cured by prayer),” Cardinal Pell told ABC Television on Monday.

“And there are quite a number of examples in the books.”

Cardinal Pell says that won’t give sick people a false sense of security because they realise cure by prayer is a “very long shot”.

The effectiveness of prayer is a much-debated topic, for obvious reasons. This AAP article is basically just a sound bite – there’s no real substance and it’s just been picked up because of this one comment (and it should be noted that it’s probably not a full comment – it looks like AAP decided to forgo the more typically used square brackets around their extrapolation of Cardinal Pell’s comment). Really, it’s so useless and uninformative that it should be ignored.

But people don’t ignore stuff like this. So it’s important to pick up on the details – on one hand, the Cardinal is saying that, well, duh, of course prayer can cure cancer – like it’s a commonly accepted treatment that has a high success ratio. But on the other hand, people should also be expected to realise that curing cancer by prayer is a “long shot”.

These two sentences, to me, seem to be saying completely opposite things – which is it, Cardinal Pell? Can prayer cure cancer? Or should people not being relying on it? Because if it’s the latter, even vaguely implying that it is “obvious” that prayer can cure cancer sends very mixed signals to people that might be (foolishly) relying on your (non-medical) judgment on their health and well-being.