Is Prayer CAM?

Background: Alternative medicine researchers and policy makers have classified prayer as a mind-body intervention, and thus, a modality of complementary and alternative medicine ( CAM). As such, numerous epidemiological surveys of CAM utilization-which have included prayer-depict increasing CAM use, particularly in specific racial and ethnic groups. Objectives: This paper discusses the implications of conflating prayer and CAM, especially regarding the definitions of both concepts and the resulting statistics of CAM utilization.