Fraud in the name of God

Echidne of the Snakes has a post on how the medical establishment might have been frauded with a study that supposedly showed that praying improved the chances that a treatment will work. It's looking good that the study was a fraud. I remember hearing about this study awhile agoand thinking it must be bullshit then. But the media loves stories about the power of prayer.
If I remember correctly from reading Carl Sagan, there have been a number of double-blind studies on the power of prayer, and never before have they shown anything but that prayer is utterly worthless. I would find it unusual if prayer suddenly started working.
I can understand praying for strength or answers or hope or just to get closer to God, if you are religious. But I will never get asking God to make somebody better or other favors. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, than he has already planned out your life for you, and it's not like God just changes his mind because you ask nicely. Praying for favors is a hang-over from the pagan days when the gods were seen as capricious, vain, and materialistic and therefore could be influenced by pleading, praising and bribing. But a loving, all-knowing God shouldn't sit on his laurels only granting favors to people because they know how to ask properly.
We shouldn't need scientific evidence to prove that prayers don't work, anyway, just common sense. There are people all over the world right this minute who are praying their hearts out for all sorts of things--everything from winning a game to getting to live. And many of those people, if not most of them, are not going to have their prayers answered. So either prayer doesn't work, or God really is capricious and is randomly deciding who he's going to help today and who he's going to abandon.