Johan Cruyff made the comment that in Spain all the 22 football players make a cross when entering the football pitch. He commented that if praying or making a cross would really help, as both teams made a cross all the football games should end in a draw.

In a recent article in the Scientific American it seems that praying to actually can have the opposite effect. In a $ 2.4 million research study it was discovered that there was no significant change whether there was a group of about 70 praying for the recovery of patients undergoing heart surgery or not.
However, when the patient knew about the prayer group this would create stress and his or her chances of recovery actually became worse.

“The patient might think, ‘Am I so sick that they have to call in the prayer team?'”

Scott Adams wrote this on the article in his Dilbert Blog:

“I have to say that I wasn’t surprised to learn that praying for sick people didn’t help. If praying worked, convenience stores would have lines of monks down the block every time the lottery reached $100 million.”