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"whoops... "Defend" in the first sentence should be "offend"."

No biggie. I try to avoid getting all wound up over personal offense. Otherwise, I wouldn't have that much fun.

And, most of my fierceness . . . 98+%? . . . is regarding the CONTENT and not the person. So, none intended the other way, either.

And, if I worried too much about those I may be offending, goodness, I couldn't breathe hereon. Lots of people are offended just seeing my screen name without any post attached! LOL.

Well, if I read your long post correctly, your objection seems to be that "not the right people" were praying.

That's a good, testable hypothesis, theoretically. Of course, it would be impossible to make family-members NOT pray for someone if they were pre-disposed to do so.
But it might be possible to find enough subjects with loving family members who do NOT believe in intercessory prayer (perhaps from some non-Abrahamic religions?)

Anyway, if it were possible to find a sufficient sample, it seems your hypothesis COULD be tested. Perhaps the results would be different.

In this case, however, I believe this study was in response to earlier studies, also using non-loved ones, to pray for people, and those studies tentatively showed a positive effect. This study was bigger and tried to fix some of the perceived flaws in the earlier studies.

In general, do you believe intercessory prayer can have a positive effect on the prayee? And if so, can you think of a way to test that effect so we can measure its efficacy?