Anxiety

...ba href=/anxiety/a/b," or perhaps a fear that doctors expected the worst.

The mammoth prayer study cost $2.4 million and enrolled 1,802 bypass surgery patients.

The majority of funding came from the British-based John Templeton Foundation, which supports research at the intersection of science and religion.

Previous studies had examined the power of prayer for medical patients, with mixed results.

Most did not have the statistical power to reliably detect any effects of prayer.

The new study, which appears in the April issue of the American Heart Journal, was designed to be large enough to see whether patients who knew they were being prayed for had better recoveries.

The people who prayed for the patients were strangers, either Roman Catholic monks or believers belonging to other Christian denominations.

They were instructed to give a simple prayer for a quick recovery with no complications.

Some patients received prayers but were not informed of that.

In the second group the patients got no prayers, and also were not informed one way or the other.

The third group got prayers and were told so.

There was virtually no difference in complication rates between patients in the first two groups.

The third group, in which patients knew they were receiving prayers, had a complication rate of 59 percent, compared with 52 percent in the no-prayer group.

Researchers had expected that knowing someone was praying for the patients might help bring about a state of well-being, which can reduce strain o...

...ba href=/anxiety/a/b, or fear that doctors expected the worst.

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...ba href=/anxiety/a/b he suffers at the thought of no longer having the American Indian Health & Services clinic in Santa Barbara, where he can receive medical, psychological and the long-awaited dental care.

In contrast to the small clinic, the public health system is large, loud and alienating, he said.

"I would be ruined," said Lavis, who suffers from bipolar disorder.

"It's not just the medical care.

They're Indians.

I feel comfortable here.

They really care about me.

I'm not just a number." The Santa Barbara clinic is available to some 7,000 American Indians living in Ventura County.

But the facility and others like it would be closed or have services drastically reduced under the Bush administration's proposed 2007 budget.

For American Indians like Lavis, the cuts could mean having to travel hundreds of miles for treatment, scrambling to find new providers or simply going without healthcare.

"We are far more than just a health center," clinic Executive Director Alfred Granados said.

"We provide culturally sensitive, unduplicated services for American Indians that public health simply would not be able to match." Urban health programs cut The administration's proposed budget earmarks $3.2 billion for the U.S.

Indian Health Service — an overall increase of 4 percent — but eliminates all funding for its urban health program on which the Santa Barbara clinic and 33 others nationwide depend.

The 2007 budget goes into effect...