Dr. Targ - awesome stuff!

[nameless]

21:00 DR Thomas Karr of DARPA and Remote Sensing fame.

 

[mike]

Mike , prayer specifically, at least from a Christian perspective, is not to get some thing but to accept something. In the Lords prayer for instance, " Thy kingdom come THY will be done". I think God does answer prayers the way we want sometimes but not always. He either may or may not decide to answer any given prayer with yours or my wishes. There have been miraculous answers to peoples prayers at best and at worst there is an inner peace in prayer and I think this is what Targ was trying to say. Imagine what the world would be like if God answered EVERY prayer. Probably the prayers that cause the most bitterness are the prayers to save a loved one. But we are all headed for the Funeral parlor sooner or later. No it doesn't always make sense but we can't see how well they might be doing on the other side. I know you probably think its all a bunch of crock and that's your choice in the matter.......just giving you another perspective.

"And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive." (Matthew 21:22)

"Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them." (Mark 11:24)

"And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it." (John 14:13-14)

"And in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you." (John 16:23)

The conclusion from a christian perspective (website) is posted as

" These passages from God's word tell us there can be no question that God wants us to pray and that He promises to answer our prayers. "

But the reality is

Proof #2 - Statistically analyze prayer
The fact is, God never answers any prayers. The entire idea that "God answers prayers" is an illusion created by human imagination.
How do we know that "answered prayers" are illusions? We simply perform scientific experiments. We ask a group of believers to pray for something and then we watch what happens. What we find, whenever we test the efficacy of prayer scientifically, is that prayer has zero effect:

• It does not matter who prays.
• It does not matter if we pray to God, Allah, Vishnu, Zeus, Ra or any other human god.
• It does not matter what we pray about.

If we perform scientific, double-blind tests on prayer, and if the prayers involve something concrete and measurable (for example, healing people with cancer), we know that there is zero effect from prayer. Every single "answered prayer" is nothing more than a coincidence. Both scientific experiments and your everyday observations of the world show this to be the case every single time.
For example, this article A prayer for health - The Boston Globesays:

• 
  One of the most scientifically rigorous studies yet, published earlier this month, found that the prayers of a distant congregation did not reduce the major complications or death rate in patients hospitalized for heart treatments.

And:

• 
  A review of 17 past studies of ''distant healing," published in 2003 by a British researcher, found no significant effect for prayer or other healing methods.

This article from March, 2006 discusses the fact that the same conclusion was reached in another study:

• 
  In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

The bible says god answers prayers, the science says otherwise.

And that is my problem with Targs assertion his daughters study says otherwise (since reviewed and refuted) Hes presented noise as signal.

Not good science

Her famous study was not, as its reputation suggests, designed to measure the number of AIDS-related illnesses. Targ and Fred Sicher had targeted their study to measure mortality but were caught off-guard by triple-drug anti-retroviral therapy, which became common practice one month into the six-month trial. When biostatistician Dan Moore broke the randomization code to unblind the data, it told them nothing - since only one patient had died, the data was meaningless.

Moore brought Targ and Sicher into his office and showed him the data on his computer. Moore thought this new triple-drug therapy was nothing short of a medical miracle, the triumph of science. It was saving lives! But Targ and Sicher didn't want to see it that way. Targ asked him to crunch the numbers on the secondary scores - one a measure of HIV physical symptoms, the other a measure of quality of life. These came out inconclusive; the treatment group didn't score better than the control. Not what they wanted to find. In dismay, Targ called her father. He calmed her down, told her to keep looking. She had Moore run the mood state scores. These came out worse - the treatment group was in more psychological stress than the control group. Same for CD4+ counts.

David Spiegel, who runs the PsychoSocial Research Lab at Stanford, was the primary reviewer of Targ's paper for the Western Journal of Medicine. Targ's work, he said, deserved its reputation as the best-designed study measuring distant healing. Then I told him about the procedural flaws.

"I'm even more troubled by the multiple endpoints than the unblinding," he said with increasing concern. "It's a little post hoc. Normally, we accept the standard that a finding must have less than a 1-in-20 chance of randomly occurring. When you're on your third or fourth attempt, it's much more likely a 1-in-20 event will occur, so the standard has to be higher. You divide the alpha by the number of attempts, thus 1 in 60, 1 in 80, et cetera. There was no indication of this recast standard."

So Targs 1 in 20 comment on the paracast, was deceptive, he would be well aware that by the forth attempt to data mine the results the standard would be 1 in 80 for significant result

 

[SRL+]

FYI, Youtube message.., “the uploader has not made this video available in your country”.., meaning USA.

 

[mike]

And australia

 

[mike]

Study Concludes Intercessory Prayer Doesn’t Work; Christians Twist the Results

May 15, 2009
I was reading an article in Christianity Today and one of the paragraphs made me do a double-take. I couldn’t believe anyone was actually writing it… it was incredible how much fact-twisting was going on.
First, a bit of background.
It’s no surprise that prayer can have a positive effect on those who believe in it. If you pray, it can relax you and make you feel better. If you know others are praying for you — that others care about you — you feel better and your body might actually respond to that positivity. None of this has anything to do with a god answering (or even listening to) the prayers. It functions more like meditation. Prayer can have a calming, healing effect for those who buy into it.

But what happens when others pray for you and you are unaware of it? To no atheist’s surprise, this has never been shown to work.
This idea has been tested repeatedly — usually, the studies have flaws. And even when the results show that the intercessory prayer has no effect on anyone, those who believe in it will look at the hits and ignore (or rationalize) the misses.

Three years ago, a multi-million-dollar, controlled, double-blind study was conducted to test intercessory prayer.
The Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) found two major results:
1) “Intercessory prayer had no effect on recovery from surgery without complications.”
2) “Patients who knew they were receiving intercessory prayer fared worse.”
Fared worse?! Even I was surprised by that. So were many Christians — this didn’t sit well with them.

This new article from Christianity Today, though, offers a rationalization I’ve never heard before. You can tell they’re really straining to find a silver lining…

Ironically, STEP actually supports the Christian worldview. Our prayers are nothing at all like magical incantations. Our God bears no resemblance to a vending machine. The real scandal of the study is not that the prayed-for group did worse, but that the not-prayed-for group received just as much, if not more, of God’s blessings. In other words, God seems to have granted favor without regard to either the quantity or even the quality of the prayers. By instinct, we might selfishly prefer that God give preferential treatment to those who are especially, deliberately, and correctly prayed for, but he seems to act otherwise.​

True to his character, God appears inclined to heal and bless as many as possible.​

So the fact that the prayers had no effect on the sick? Don’t think about that, say Gregory Fung and Christopher Fung, the authors of the article. Instead, they want you to consider that prayer works because the un-prayed-for people didn’t die a horrible death.
That’s one way of ignoring the evidence when it’s staring you in the face.
There’s gotta be a perfect analogy for this somewhere. What comes to mind?

from the comments section

You would have the same success praying to a milk jug as you do praying to god -- the milk jug sometimes answers your prayer the way you want to, sometimes not and sometimes the answer is delayed. See the problem here? If things turn out the way you want them to, you say it was because you prayed. If not, it's because god knows what's best and you didn't pray for the right thing. Or, if it happens 10 years later you say god answered your prayer, it was just delayed. This is nonsense. You would have the exact same effect doing nothing.

Its so absurd it doesn't even merit rational discussion. Did people in the holocaust not pray to be delivered? Where was God then? Was the death of innocent people part of his plan? It seems odd that people who were prayed for used to die more often in the past but now we have science that actually does something people seem to be living longer. Why were people bothering to improve medicine if prayer works?

A more recent prayer study concerned proximal intercessory prayer, PIP. Conducted in Mozambique by Candy Brown, Ph.D., Indiana University, it supposedly indicated that the "hands on" technique, as practiced daily on TV, worked better than distant intercessory prayer, DIP. This study like the others, had numerous flaws and could not be taken seriously. Nevertheless, the faithful accepted this study as proof of prayerful healing and the existence of a deity. Skeptics rejected the study for its lack of scientific procedure. To date, no prayer study has shown that prayer works other than stimulate a placebo affect. A study with real undisputed proof would be to show prayer grows back amputated limbs. I'm still waiting for that, as are the faithful

Study Concludes Intercessory Prayer Doesn’t Work; Christians Twist the Results

 

[mike]

While sad its relevent

She also put a lot of stock in her own intuition and dreams. All through her life, she had a recurring dream in which a birthday cake with 42 candles appeared (once, it was 42 birthday cakes). Targ became convinced this was a sign that she would die. At 42. Next year. 2003.

And then talk turned to those dreams of birthday cakes with 42 candles. Elisabeth Targ died two weeks short of her 41st birthday.

 

[dyingsun]

And not in germany.

 

[nameless]

what can i say dudes, you missing out on a great exposé. perhaps one of you geniuses can work out how to circumvent the country block bs. would love for you guys to see it.

 

[Konrad Hartmann]

I enjoyed the episode, but I'm still hung up on the bit about the casino. So, really, the only secret to winning is betting more when you feel lucky? Maybe I missed something.

 

[ViperPilot]

This was a very interesting show, and fascinating in it's implications. Dr Targ seems like the real deal, whether his daughter is or not is another question, but he seems to pass muster, Great job, guys!

 

[mike]

I guess my concern is this.
When his daughter set up her experiment it was designed to measure a certain effect. When the results were unblinded the data did not show that effect, so instead they re mined the data to find another effect, didnt find that either, tried again still the data did not show the effect they were after. eventually they moved the goalposts far enough so that the data fit.

The experiment was designed to test mortality rates in prayed for vs unprayed for

Her famous study was not, as its reputation suggests, designed to measure the number of AIDS-related illnesses. Targ and Fred Sicher had targeted their study to measure mortality but were caught off-guard by triple-drug anti-retroviral therapy, which became common practice one month into the six-month trial. When biostatistician Dan Moore broke the randomization code to unblind the data, it told them nothing - since only one patient had died, the data was meaningless

Targ asked him to crunch the numbers on the secondary scores - one a measure of HIV physical symptoms, the other a measure of quality of life. These came out inconclusive; the treatment group didn't score better than the control. Not what they wanted to find

She had Moore run the mood state scores. These came out worse - the treatment group was in more psychological stress than the control group. Same for CD4+ counts

Moore was crunching the last data they had, hospital stays and doctor visits. "Looks like we have statistical significance!" Moore announced.

But even this result proves nothing

Later that week, Moore met with an AIDS physician at California Pacific Medical Center. This doctor thought distant healing was bogus but agreed to give advice. He remarked that the length of hospital stays wasn't very meaningful. Patients with health insurance tend to stay in hospitals longer than uninsured ones. He pointed Moore to an important AIDS paper that had been recently published. It defined the 23 illnesses associated with AIDS. He told Moore they ought to have been measuring the occurrence of these illnesses all along. Moore took this list to Targ and Sicher. There was only one problem. They hadn't collected this data. .

They gathered the medical charts and gave them to their assistant to black out the names of the patients. This done, Targ and Sicher began poring over the charts again, noting the data they hadn't previously collected. Since Sicher had interviewed many of these patients (up to three times), Moore worried Sicher could recognize them just by the dates they came to the hospital and what they were treated for. Sicher admitted he could (there were only 40). He had also seen which group each patient was assigned to, treatment or control, but he swore he didn't remember and maintained he was therefore impartial. (Sicher remembers this differently. He insists he couldn't recognize the patients from their charts and never knew which group each was in.) Targ told her boyfriend she was worried about Sicher's impartiality, but she took him at his word, even though Sicher was an ardent believer in distant healing, by his own frequent admission. He had put up the money himself for the pilot study ($7,500), had paid for the blood tests. He had a vested interest in the outcome.

This isn't what science means by double-blind. The data may all be legitimate, but it's not good form. Statisticians call this the sharpshooter's fallacy - spraying bullets randomly, then drawing a target circle around a cluster. When Targ and Sicher wrote the paper that made her famous, they let the reader assume that all along their study had been designed to measure the 23 AIDS-related illnesses - even though they're careful never to say so. They never mentioned that this was the last in a long list of endpoints they looked at, or that it was data collected after an unblinding.

Russell knew this, yet he presented a failed experiment as sucessful during the interview.

If he would misrepresent the results of this experiment, we must question anything else he tells us as "true"

Having said that ive seen some RV demonstrations that were very convincing, and my own views on the nature of time do allow for the mechanism to work in theory.

But personally by the standards i use to weigh up data, i must now be very wary of anything this witness says. In telling lies about the results of one experiment. I must question any other data he presents in that context.

The courts work the exact same way, if in the course of giving testimony the witness can be shown to have deliberately misled the court, they are deemed an "unreliable witness" and the magistrate must dismiss the entirety of their testimony.

 

[mike]

And at the 1:50 ish mark he also makes the claim cardiac patients do better if they are ptayed for, citing a study done by harris.

But

Researchers have been trying to prove this and even to measure the effect of prayer. Since 1988, at least two studies have found that third-party prayers bestow benefits, but two others concluded that there are no benefits. These and other studies have been soundly criticized for flaws in both method and outcome. The fuzzy results goaded researchers to conduct the largest and most scientifically rigid investigation to date. It covered 1,802 people who underwent coronary bypass surgery at six different hospitals from Oklahoma City to Boston. The cost was $2.4 million, paid by the John Templeton Foundation and the Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation of Memphis.
In a clear setback for those who believe in the power of prayer, their prayers were not answered. Prayers offered by strangers did not reduce the medical complications of major heart surgery. Not only that, but patients who knew that others were praying for them fared worse than those who did not receive such spiritual support, or who did but were not aware of receiving it.

Harvard Gazette: Prayers don't help heart surgery patients

Praying for patients undergoing heart operations does not improve their outcomes, a US study suggests.
A study found those who were prayed for were as likely to have a setback in hospital, be re-admitted, or die within six months as those not prayed for.

The results of this study contradict earlier findings from the same team which suggested a drop of a quarter or more in "adverse outcomes" - including death, heart failure or heart attack.
However, that trial involved only 150 patients. Other research since has found no evidence of any benefits.
This study looked at 700 patients undergoing angiograms (an X-ray of the blood vessels) or other heart operations at nine hospitals across the US.
Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist prayer groups were assigned to pray for 371 of the patients. The rest had no prayer group.

BBC NEWS | Health | Prayer 'no aid to heart patients'

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.
And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.
Because it is the most scientifically rigorous investigation of whether prayer can heal illness, the study, begun almost a decade ago and involving more than 1,800 patients, has for years been the subject of speculation.
The question has been a contentious one among researchers. Proponents have argued that prayer is perhaps the most deeply human response to disease, and that it may relieve suffering by some mechanism that is not yet understood. Skeptics have contended that studying prayer is a waste of money and that it presupposes supernatural intervention, putting it by definition beyond the reach of science.
At least 10 studies of the effects of prayer have been carried out in the last six years, with mixed results. The new study was intended to overcome flaws in the earlier investigations. The report was scheduled to appear in The American Heart Journal next week, but the journal's publisher released it online yesterday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html

You'd think he would have been aware of the largest and most scientifically rigid investigation to date.
It covered 1,802 people who underwent coronary bypass surgery at six different hospitals from Oklahoma City to Boston. The cost was $2.4 million, paid by the John Templeton Foundation and the Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation of Memphis.

The finding ?
Prayers offered by strangers did not reduce the medical complications of major heart surgery.

In presenting his data he's clearly chosen to disregard the larger more recent studys in favour of older flawed ones................

Its not hard to see which flowchart he used

 

[mike]

All of this has reminded me of a personal event related to the topic of RV

Many years ago, i was a member of the open minds forum, where my opinions ran afoul of one of the senior members.
He decided to RV me
And announced to everybody i was an ET, of a type he was well familiar with. A BAAAAAAAD ET.

By the time i walked away from this fiasco, he had convinced most of the audience and OMF management this was a concrete cold fact.

 

[mike]

details of the study cited by Dr Targ

Harris WS and others. 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 159:2273-2278, 1999.

In 1999, the American Medical Association's Archives of Internal Medicine published a better-designed study of nearly a thousand consecutive patients who were newly admitted to the coronary care unit of a hospital in Kansas City. The researchers created a 35-item score sheet that was used to measure what happened to the patients during a 28-day period in which 15 groups of 5 persons ("intercessors") prayed individually for about half the patients. The intercessors were given the patients' first names and were asked to pray daily for "a speedy recovery with no complications." The prayed-for group had a 10-11% reduction in total scores even though their average length of hospital stay was similar to that of the "usual-care" group. The researchers also noted that: (a) some patients had asked hospital clergy to pray for them; (b) many, if not most patients in both groups were probably receiving intercessory and/or direct prayer from family, friends and/or clergy, so that the study was most likely measuring the effects of "supplementary intercessory prayer"; (c) although the difference would be expected to occur by chance alone only 1 in 25 times such an experiment were conducted, chance still remains a possible explanation of the results; and (d) using the scoring method of the San Francisco study yielded no significant difference between the two groups [13].

The researchers concluded that "the result suggests that prayer may be an effective adjunct to standard medical care" and that further studies should be done [13]. I disagree. The "10-11% reduction in the score sheet" may be statistically significant but is not clinically significant and probably occurred by chance.

Some Thoughts about Faith Healing

The very study he cites as proving it works actually states

prayer may be an effective adjunct to standard medical care" and that further studies should be done

Notwithstanding this study has been shown to be flawed, and that more recent larger and more scientifically rigid investigations have disproved it. Hes clearly twisted the studys own conclusion from may be and further studies should be done, to this study proved it worked.

It would be like me taking a study that showed UFO's may be of an extraterrestrial origin, and claiming a study has proved UFO are of ET origin.

Its a gross misrepresentation of the facts

 

[ALPHA ROMEO UNIFORM]

Mike,
In the end its up to the individual.

 

[mike]

Mike,
In the end its up to the individual.

Sorry mate im missing the point of your post

To me Its no different than hoagland cherrypicking and twisting his data to present a false conclusion. We have the same dynamic here Targ presents himself as a scientist
His book touted as

A Physicist's Proof of Psychic Abilities.
Including a chapter claiming "proof" of psychic healing, but as ive shown hes used flawed reasearch, research since disproved....................

Hes cherry picked the data, ignoring results that contradict his claims.

He has deliberately presented refuted and disproved studys as "proof"

He's used the word proof, its not a word that should be used with such poor justification imo

Its very poor form

 

[nameless]

All of this has reminded me of a personal event related to the topic of RV

Many years ago, i was a member of the open minds forum, where my opinions ran afoul of one of the senior members.
He decided to RV me
And announced to everybody i was an ET, of a type he was well familiar with. A BAAAAAAAD ET.

By the time i walked away from this fiasco, he had convinced most of the audience and OMF management this was a concrete cold fact.

I have no doubt in my mind that you are an ET and you are Gallifreyian.

 

[Jeff Davis]

Russell knew this, yet he presented a failed experiment as sucessful during the interview.

If he would misrepresent the results of this experiment, we must question anything else he tells us as "true"

Mike forgive me, but I detect both a bit of mind reading and faith at work here.

Do not mistake the fact that RV has been demonstrably proved. It has, and so has a great deal of what would be considered science fiction just 20 years ago within the realms of Quantum Mechanics and Hard Small Particle Physics. DR. Targ is just man, albeit, a man that has made tremendous strides in the face of utter empirical ignorance. One bad apple does not serve to prove Sir Issac wrong. Neither is guilt by association cause to hang a man.

 

[ALPHA ROMEO UNIFORM]

Mike,
I mean take or leave on the RV matter . I agree BS out there that's why I take this field with a pinch of salt. More important stuff like whiskey , women and rock.

 

[mike]

Oh goodness no, ive posted this here before

Remote Viewing Demonstration while our News Cameras were Rolling!

I would no more use my issues with the Targ interview to suggest RV is all bunk, than i would to use hoaglands claims to assert there could never have been life on mars.

My comments are related specifically to the comments made on the recent show

Mike forgive me, but I detect both a bit of mind reading and faith at work here.

But Targ and Sicher didn't want to see it that way. Targ asked him to crunch the numbers on the secondary scores - one a measure of HIV physical symptoms, the other a measure of quality of life. These came out inconclusive; the treatment group didn't score better than the control. Not what they wanted to find. In dismay, Targ called her father. He calmed her down, told her to keep looking. She had Moore run the mood state scores. These came out worse - the treatment group was in more psychological stress than the control group. Same for CD4+ counts.