Graham Jagger wants me to tell the BJGP what I think about the Barlow/Lewith article.1 As in all areas of healthcare, clinical trials rely on the cooperation of clinicians. If they refuse to help with patient recruitment, trials may not be feasible. If I had been such a clinician in Southampton, I probably would have told my patients what the evidence on spiritual healing is. My own review concluded in 2003 that ‘the weight of the evidence [is] against the notion that distant healing is more than a placebo’.2 Since then the most rigorous studies continued to be negative. My point is that a clinical trial needs a sound basis, and for spiritual healing I fail to see it.
Footnotes
Ho hum. The principle is to judge everything we receive on its own merits. We try to do that for the material on CAM, but it is made more tricky because of the generally well entrenched positions of authors, on both sides, and in addition it's not clear whether or not CAM is a core part of primary care. Edzard Ernst does contribute quite regularly, but it would be as wrong to reject any of his articles because of that, as it would be to accept anyone else's because their contributions are infrequent. — Ed
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2009.