California's highest court puts an end to suit against critic of prayer study

The state Supreme Court has rejected an appeal of a case against a Riverside doctor who had criticized a study which reported that long-distance prayers increases fertility.

Dr.Bruce Flamm, co-organizer of the Inland Empire Atheists, Agnostics and Skeptics, hailed the decision which culminates a two and a half year lawsuit in which he was accused of defamation of character.

"The legal process has successfully ended this mess, " Flamm commented after he was informed of the decision Mondag.

"These types of cases are often intimidation tactics intended to shut people up," Flamm said. But the lawsuit backfired, and the plaintiff, Kwang Cha, M.D., will be required to pay about $100,000 for Flamm's legal costs.

Published in the prestigious Journal of Reproductive Medicine, the study "Does prayer influence the success of in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer? Report of a masked, randomized trial"
reported that women undergoing in vitro fertilization in Korea who were prayed for by people in Australia, Canada, and the United States conceived at twice the rate as those patients that did not receive prayer. Articles touting the extraordinary results appeared in media around the world, including the New York Times and Time magazine.

Having this study become part of the medical literature "... creates a lot of dangers," Flamm said today, noting that in-vitro fertization is expensive:
"If women think they can increase their fertility through prayers why would they receive medical care?" he asked.

The study carried the names of two Columbia University  researchers including Cha, who at the time was director of the Cha Columbia Infertility Center and Rogerio Lobo, M.D., then the chairman of the university's Obstetrics and Gynecology Department. A third author, Daniel Wirth, a lawyer and parapsychologist, held no medical degree and was later sentenced to five years in prison on unrelated fraud charges.

The study's crediting of divine intervention for fertility rang bells. Flamm, a clinical professor of OB/Gyn at the University of California at Irvine, immediately began to question the conduct of the study and suggested the possibility of fabrication. His phone calls to the journal were not answered nor did the Journal of Reproductive Medicine publish his letters until more than three years later. Flamm made some 20 calls to the journal's editor, Laurence Devoe "begging him to retract the article," but the editor steadfastly refused. Flamm also attacked the study's methods in an article in the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine. "Faith healing by prayer: Analysis of Cha KY, Wirth DP, Lobo RA, Does prayer influence the success of in vitro fertilization embryo transfer? Sci Review Alt Med. 2002;6(1):47–50.

The criticism from numerous quarters prompted Columbia to conduct an investigation, which was apparently halted when Dr. Lobo formally removed his name from the study.

The lawsuit began after Flamm published an article entitled "Prayer Study Author Charged With Plagiarism" in Ob. Gyn. News, a print medical news journal. The one-page article included the text: "This may be the first time in history that all three authors of a randomized, controlled study have been found guilty of fraud, deception, and/or plagiarism."

The allegation of plagiarism stemmed from Cha's co-authorship of another article, published in Fertility and Sterility in 2005. The Los Angeles Times reported in February 2007 that Alan DeCherney, editor-in-chief of Fertility and Sterility, had identified this second article as plagiarized.  DeCherney later retracted this comment when Cha threatened to sue him and the Times.

Cha filed the lawsuit against Flamm in Los Angeles Superior Court judge on Aug. 31, 2007, alleging that the implication of "found guilty" in the sentence is that he had been convicted of plagiarism by a court or administrative body, which was not the case.

However, Flamm's lawyers said the sentence -- when read in context -- meant only that Cha's scientific peers had found him guilty of plagiarism. The Superior Court judge dismissed the suit on the grounds that it had been filed in an attempt to harass Flamm. The Supreme Court affirmed that decision

In addition to criticizing the prayer study on scientific grounds, Flamm says the results don't make sense on other grounds. He says that if one assumes this study  revealed the existence of an intercessory God, perplexing questions arise, such as: "Why didn't God ensure that all the women who were prayed for got pregnant?"

In the entire history of modern science no claim of any type of supernatural phenomenon has ever been replicated under strictly controlled conditions, Flamm pointed out.

Click here to see copies of the study and Flamm's critique