ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Research shows more than half of Americans pray for their health. But the age-old debate over religion and science rages on in the medical world. Should we be spending money on clinical trials that involve prayer?

Prayer can liven up a room or quiet an entire congregation. But can it save lives?

Duke cardiologist Mitchell W. Krucoff, M.D., says it's worth studying to find out. In one of the first clinical trials of its kind, he and colleagues are looking at whether distant prayer -- prayer from people you don't even know -- can help patients recover quicker after a heart procedure.

"Prayer, healing touch, compassion, love. These are things that we do all the time in millions of human being and literally have for thousands of years," Dr. Krucoff, of Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, N.C., tells Ivanhoe.

In the pilot study, which is still ongoing, patients who were prayed for had up to a 30-percent reduction in adverse outcomes. But more recent results show prayer did not affect patient outcomes. Despite these conflicting results, Dr. Krucoff says distant prayer should still be studied. "We consider this a potentially very unique area of therapeutic advance," he says.

But some -- like Psychiatrist Stephen Barrett, M.D., of Allentown, Pennsylvania -- disagree. "There's no point in studying prayer," he says. "It doesn't work. End of story." He and others say distant prayer studies are a waste of time and money because the effect of prayer can't easily be measured.

"What these studies are actually designed to do is not so much test prayer as test God, and that's why they're double-blinded, so that patients have no knowledge of whether they're being prayed for or not," Michael Cerullo, M.D., Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at University of Cincinnati, tells Ivanhoe.

But Dr. Cerullo says not all prayer studies should be dismissed. "There are studies about positive effects of spirituality and prayer and a person's religious background and their health," he says.

In fact, studies from Duke, Dartmouth and Yale reveal just going to church can help. Patients who don't attend church stay in the hospital three-times longer, heart patients are 14-times more likely to die following surgery, and elderly people have double the rate of stroke.

Doris Redfern believes her faith and others' prayers helped her recover from stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Doctors gave her three months to live. That was three years ago! After her diagnosis, Redfern's church sent out prayer requests to others around the country.

"I started getting these cards, you know, just coming in by the dozens, and the mailman's bringing them, and he said, 'I want you to know my family is praying for you every day,' and you know it just works," Redfern says. She believes prayer made her medical treatment work even when her doctor said nothing would. "I never thought that I would be around to see my first great-grandchild!"