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Okay, now we're really off on a tangent. Sorry.
Yeah, I got over excitable. I'm sorry to have gotten so off track

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What I'm getting at is, if your prayers aren't going to bend God's will, why bother praying for the sick at all?
It's more like I believe our prayers don't CONTROL God's will- His will is not dependent on our prayers. Yet it IS clear (in scripture) that He hears our prayers and responds to them. That isn't to say that a prayer for healing results in healing- the response might be something quite different.

Just like a request by a son to a father for a ride to the mall might not result in a trip to the mall- but perhaps it leads to something else- going to the movies later, playing catch, who knows? The point is the access the son has to his father and that his father hears and responds, even if the father doesn't do exactly what the son asks.

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Surely He already knows about them.
Agreed. The point of prayer (as I see it) is that access we have to God, which may result in His intervention in the world, but might not. What it will always result in is a deeper relationship with Him. In my opinion, THAT is the answer to "what it all means".

Which goes back to the issue I take with trying to evaluate prayer's effectiveness on the basis of God's granting of our petitions. Since I don't see that as the primary goal of prayer, I don't see it as a reasonable way to evaluate it either.

Of course, you could take the results of the study to give strength to my point of view. It appears that if prayers are successful, then this successfullness is not measured in how often we recieve that for which we ask. And obviously, the other alternative is that prayers aren't successful at all. Not my opinion, but I figured I'd state it or someone else would!
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-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.