Suppose there's a man who goes to the hospital because he isn't feeling well, and the doctor who checks him out runs all the tests and tells him that he, unfortunately, has a very serious illness. Even with treatment, he's given a 1 percent chance to survive for a year.

Upon learning this terrible news, his family, which is very religious, begins the business of praying for him, very hard and very often. They enlist the help of prayer groups and so on in their quest to heal this gravely ill man who has little chance of survival. But following 12 months of intense treatment, he is given a clean bill of health.

The question, then, is what led to this seemingly miraculous turn of events. Was he just part of that 1 percent statistic who responded well enough to treatment that he beat the crushingly impossible odds? Was all the hours and energy devoted by family and friends to praying for him what got him through this terrible, dark time? Was it a combination of both? Or does it even matter at all as long as everything worked out?

His doctors would probably say that it was their work that did it all. The family members would probably say that it was the prayer that helped him, either entirely or partly. You couldn't tell the doctors anything that would diminish their absolute belief in their treatments' effects, and you couldn't convince the family that everything they poured into their prayer had no effect.

As you might expect, a large amount of scientific effort has been concentrated over the last 150 years or so on determining what effect The Power of Prayer has on medical conditions, if any. The problem there, as with the above evidence (or, if you prefer, "evidence"), is that even if you could prove definitively that it worked or didn't, people would still sit there and say that your study was all B.S. anyway. Devout people tend to be healthier in general, but is that because of their religion or just some random thing? Who knows? What's the difference? Prayer is the most used non-medical or pseudo-medical treatment in the world to "treat" illness.

It's an interesting debate, and one where most people are going to land on one side or the other. Fence-straddlers have little place here, and certainly no one on either side has a second to spare for their arguments.

Which of course reminds one of the current fighting debate in the NHL. The Power of Pugilism is backed by one side and decried by another. The battle lines have all been drawn and everyone is pretty well dug-in at this point, with very few if any occupying the no-man's land between them. Both sides believe in their heart of hearts that they are right about the debate.

Those who want fighting banned say that of course it's simply too dangerous to continue letting these players punch each other in the face as a sort of ultra-violent and bloody sideshow to a sport that's already so driven by extreme violence. Is The Code, or the fan's entertainment, worth a guy getting CTE and eventually — and in some cases not-so-eventually —having his life ruined? Those that say yes come off as callous and ghastly. These are people's lives we're talking about. Yes the people who fight for a living enter into the arrangement knowing at least some of the risks, and not caring because look how much money they're getting, but opponents of needless NHL fighting argue that this shouldn't be a situation guided by the invisible hand of the free market. They say getting Ron Paulitics out of hockey seems, from a human perspective, the right thing to do.

On the other side of this acrimonious aisle is of course the dwindling but not yet small number of fighting advocates. They believe that the occasional fistic fling has its place in the game and will not be dissuaded to the contrary (until they eventually are) because of any number of factors. Usually, it involves the role fighting retains in player safety overall, and specifically star player safety. The argument is that if you have a guy who is capable of beating the hell out of anyone who looks at your team's best players sideways, then obviously no one will look at him at all, thus freeing him to score goal upon goal against them. This seems logical enough.

The example of this which has been prevalent in the past week and a half or so, following Steve Yzerman's pronouncement that the league should take steps to make fighting a less viable option for players who would engage in it, such as by giving them game misconducts in addition to the five-minute majors that already accompany the infraction. It is important to keep in mind that fighting is not technically allowed in the NHL — thus the penalty — but that it is tolerated and certainly viewed on the same level as a rather serious high stick, elbow, hit from behind, etc.; it's not often these latter major penalties are assessed without an accompanying game misconduct, and thus adding the latter onto a fighting major may seem to some like a logical next step.

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