My main reason for posting here is that Spot the Dog and Praise have written about research on praying and I know how this research is usually done and have read several of the original reports. In addition to that I think that some posters, starting with LongJohn, fail to make the necessary distinction between the positive effect of being cared for (whichever way) and the purported means by which a positive effect is reached (see Bill D as an example of a poster who makes the distinction clearly).

Does it help if a patient is cared for in a supporting way and knows about it?
The answer both from anecdotal reports and from research is an unequivocal 'Yes'. Having positive feelings toward the own healing process, being in a good mood, knowing that others care for them in whichever way they show it, having a positive outlook on life in general etc. helps the patient to get well. The effect is in many cases somewhat smaller than we all would wish (compared to the effect of taking or not taking a medication) , but it is there. It has been shown with several outcome variables. Studies have shown that the human immune system profits from a positive mood in the patient. How and why, is less well known than the people studying these effects wish for.

One problem is that the potential effects are completely confounded and so you cannot know from these studies what the causal agent was, like was it the prayer as such, was it that the patient knew about the prayer, was it that the patient knew that she was cared for enough to be included into others' prayers....Some of you have made clear that they do not care at all about causation as long as a practice helps. I have not the slightest problem with that position if you are comfortable with it, but others, me for example, do care a lot about what was the causal variable and what was only a variable concomitant to (correlating with) another.

Some of you make statements about the causal agent (karma, energy, prayer,...) and even use words like 'know' in that context. In my eyes you'd better make a clear distinction between things you know of from observation and your personal interpretation about which way an effect you have seen was caused.

Before I come to studies that try to disentangle the potential causes of healing by support I'll shortly mention another set of research on religion and well being.

Are religious persons more healthy?
Surprising perhaps to some, the response in many studies is 'Yes'. The studies, however, are surveys or correlational studies. You cannot do experiments in that field for that would mean to randomly assign people to a group which lives according to one religion for a decade or so and the others not to lead a religious life for the same time. You wouldn't let someone else make this decision about your life. So a typical study would look whether 'religious' persons (often simply determined by regular church going, but there are other measures) live longer, have less health problems,...There are two obvious problems with this research: First, in some studies the health problem looked for did interfere with the ability to go to church and it seems kind of unfair to say, e.g., that regular church goers have less problems with the legs. Second, the variable 'religious life' is hopelessly confounded with others as 'drinking less alcohol', 'living healthier', having more social support'...and again you do not know what the real reason was, and churchgoing is but one of many candidates. Studies that have tried to take other variables into account and to separate the effects statistically usually have found that church going per se was neither healthy nor unhealthy. How about real experiments on religious practices and health?

Do prayers help healing when the prayee doesn't know about being prayed for?
The response to this question is 'No, there is no evidence for that'. I'll talk only about prayers for most experiments I know of have been done with prayers, but there has also been research about other methods of support. These are the experiments Praise and Spot the Dog allude to, but report incorrectly the gist of the results. The idea in these experiments is to keep everything constant except the one single variable, e.g. prayer (or not, for the controls). In order to keep everything else constant (e.g., expectation of relief) you don't tell the prayees and the controls whether they are prayed for or not (blind experiment). In addition, in order to disallow differential treatment by the doctors you don't tell them which patient is prayed for and which isn't (double blind experiment). If the treating doctors are not the evaluators of the health state you also do not tell the evaluators which patient was in which group (triple blind experiment).
Spot the Dog has written that a blind test has been made. I assume that (s)he has meant 'double blind' when writing 'blind'. For a blind experiment alone would be incompetent research. (If you actually mean what you have written, I apologise, for a blind study might well have the result you report, but it would not be taken serious by anybody with a sound methodological knowledge).

If experiments are made this way the usual result is 'no effect of treatment (prayer)'. Look at the first experiment I know of, Galton, F. "Statistical inquiries into the efficacy of prayer," Fortnightly Review, 12:125-135, 1872, look at the more recent work by Joyce, C.R.B., and R.M.C. Welldon "The efficacy of prayer: A double-blind clinical trial," Journal of Chronic Disease, 18:367-377, 1965, or look at Collipp, P.J. "The efficacy of prayer: A triple blind study," Medical Times, 97:201-204, 1969.
There are studies reporting a small positive effect, e.g. Byrd, R.C. " Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population", Southern Medical Journal, 1988, 81, 826-829, or the most recent one that also has been reported about in the popular press, Harris, W.S. et al., "A randomized, controlled trial of the effects of remote, intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients admitted to the coronary care unit", Archives of Internal medicine, 1999, 159, 2273-2278. These studies are not taken serious by the research community for they have serious methodological problems and flaws:

The first has not a proper design and a faulty statistical analysis (testing for many variables and interpreting only the very few significant ones which were intercorrelated to make it even worse; most probably, the few positive results were alpha errors stemming from an inflation of significance tests). The second one has a flawless design, in principle, but again some errors in statistical analysis. The detail that makes it completely invalid, however, is the interesting finding (you have to go into the fine print of the tables to spot that) that the patients who have been assigned to the to be prayed for group have been less sick than the controls even before the 'random assignment' has been performed. That leaves open two interpretations: One is that prayers even work backwards in time, that is God heals those patients before the prayers that nobody (on earth) knows yet will be prayed for at a later time. The other is that the assignment to the groups was much less random than can be wished for, i.e. it has been done by someone who was interested in a special result. If you know which religious groups, especially in the USA, sponsor such studies, you'll trust them as much I do trust lung cancer studies sponsored by the tobacco industry.

In summary, there is no convincing evidence at all yet that thoughts, prayers or similar activities have any healing power as long as the healee doesn't know about these activities. And when there is no evidence of a fact there is no need for building theories to explain a fact that may no be a fact at all. How new age thinkers construct such theories misusing good words from the physical sciences has been shown above by Little Hawk in a splendid parody on this type of thinking (BTW, I like it better than your parody on earthquakes, for it is much more subtle and not so easy to look through).

Back to the question of this thread. Do the healing threads help? Yes, of course, they do, unless Spaw, e.g., would choose to deliberately withhold all supporting thoughts and wishes in the respective thread from Karen. And that is definitely not the idea of such a thread.

A final personal remark on the titling of that thread which I did not want to make in the thread in question but feel free to make in a thread about such threads. I personally very strongly disagree with the use of the words 'healing thoughts' in the title and would wish for a titling which is neutral ('support', 'supportive thoughts', ...) and does not imply by the very titling itself a mode of action which implies one particular belief system which I do not share at all. Any thread asking for support titled in a way implying a particular belief will not see my contribution, may it be titled 'pray to Allah for...', 'sacrifice a lamb for...', 'boil a life toad for...' or 'healing thoughts needed for...'.

Wolfgang