1oldminer-
"No one is saying that the doctors and surgeons were highly skilled in saving your sister's life...and I pray that she continues to do well and has a speedy recover."

Thank you for your offer of prayers for my sister, unfortunately, this would be pretty inneffectual as you do not even know who she is!

Prayer - Useful or Useless....in this case certainly useless!

Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

We really need to recognize that this kind of human response is very well documented. Authoritatively telling people they are going to die can in itself be fatal.

You may know that Australian aborigines fear something called pointing the bone. A shaman shakes a bone at a person, sings a song, and soon after, the person dies. This is a specific example of a phenomenon generally referred to as hex death. A person is cursed by an authority figure and subsequently dies. According to medical studies, the person generally dies of dehydration, implying that they just give up. But the progression is very erratic, and shock symptoms may play a part, suggesting adrenal effects of fright and hopelessness. Yet this deadly curse is nothing but information, and it can be undone with information.

A friend of mine was an intern at Bellevue Hospital in New York when a 28-year-old man from Aruba came in saying he was going to die because he’d been cursed. He was admitted for a psychiatric evaluation and found to be normal, but his health steadily declined while he was in the hospital. My friend was able to rehydrate him, balance his electrolytes and give him nutrients, but nevertheless, the man worsened. He insisted that he was cursed and that nothing could be done to prevent his death.

My friend realized that this patient would, in fact, soon die. The situation was desperate. Finally, he told the patient that he, the doctor, was going to invoke his own powerful medicine to undo the curse, and his medicine was more powerful than any other. He then got together with the house staff, bought some head dresses and rattles, and danced around the patient in the middle of the night chanting what they hoped would be effective-sounding phrases. I think several of them were trying to remember their bar mitzvah.

The patient showed no reaction, but the next day, he began to improve. He went home a few days later, and I would say that my friend literally saved his life.

Assumption number one was that if a trial were managed correctly, a medication would perform as well or badly in a Phoenix hospital as in a Bangalore clinic. Potter discovered, however, that geographic location alone could determine whether a drug bested placebo or crossed the futility boundary. By the late '90s, for example, the classic antianxiety drug diazepam (also known as Valium) was still beating placebo in France and Belgium. But when the drug was tested in the US, it was likely to fail. Conversely, Prozac performed better in America than it did in western Europe and South Africa. It was an unsettling prospect: FDA approval could hinge on where the company chose to conduct a trial.

re 1oldminer-
"You may not believe in her faith in angel guiding the hands of the surgeons that helped save her life. But she certainly does...as a brother you ought to be more loving and supporting to her especially in light of what she is personally going through."

How dare you suggest that i am not supportive or loving!!!
Just who do think you are to imply such a thing......

and as for this-
"Prayers are certainly not useless they often give one great comfort in times in great difficulty be it emotionally or medically speaking...even when the answers they seek don't come right away..sometimes we are required to wait for answer..it is a matter of putting your trust in God and submitting to his will... You scoff at it because you have little or no faith whatsoever..I daresay silky it is you who doesn't have faith in your sister's resolve to beat her cancer. "

it was my belief that support and faith from myself and the rest of my family that was of some help to get her through, NOT prayers from pious interfering believers in mythical 'creators' such as yourself!

You are entitled to your beliefs but you are NOT entitled to assume that I dont care about MY sisters wellbeing.
You really are a self righteous, patronizing fool who assumes WAY too much!!

TRY ENGAGING BRAIN BEFORE OPENING MOUTH...

Depends what the purpose of prayer is? Prayer is mainly about about communication with God not about asking and getting things.

People who see prayer as asking and getting things trivialize it's purpose.

My sister recently was operated on for mouth cancer, she was given a 5% chance of survival, well she thankfully did and still is surviving.
She puts this down to her church members prayers...personally, my thanks go to some VERY skilled and dedicated surgeons!!