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August
7, 2006
VOL.
44, NO. 14Oakland,
CA
Physician extols the healing power of prayer
His
research and writing
helped convince medical
schools to add courses
on religion and health
When he’s
on the lecture circuit, Dr. Larry Dossey, holistic physician and author
of 10 books on spirituality, prayer and health, often shares a personal
story regarding the night he broke out with a bad case of hives.
Dossey likes to include his emergency room adventure because the incident
illustrates how the medical profession is beginning to connect spirituality
and science, he said during a July 21 address at Holy Names University
in Oakland as part of the Sophia Center’s symposium on “The
Cosmology of Health.”
Dossey said he’d signed in at the local emergency room in his hometown
of Santa Fe, New Mexico, as “Mr.” rather than “Dr.”
because he didn’t want to cause a fuss over his celebrity status.
As the intake nurse wrote up his symptoms, she asked a most unexpected
question: “Do you have any pressing spiritual issues that we need
to address?”
“I said ‘no,’ but in retrospect, I wish I’d told
her I was a spiritual wreck, just to see what would have happened,”
Dossey noted with humor, adding that he was encouraged by the nurse’s
question. It served as one more validation of an emerging national trend.
In 1998, the Association of American Medical Colleges began requiring
medical students, physicians and other medical personnel to learn how
to take patients’ spiritual histories because of the growing belief
that every part of a person’s life is important in the healing process.
Additionally, medical literature, which used to reflect a major scientific
bias against spiritual beliefs among doctors, is now filled with opposite
viewpoints.
In one study, Dossey said, when asked anonymously how they regard religion,
90 percent of the doctors reported personal spiritual beliefs.
Seventy-five percent believe that miracles are occurring in medicine today.
Fifty-five percent have seen the results of such miracles.
Fifty-nine percent of the doctors reported that they pray for their patients.
Dossey, of course, counts himself among that group.
In a Voice interview prior to his lecture, the physician recounted his
own spiritual movement from a fundamentalist Texas Baptist upbringing,
through a skepticism about the effectiveness of prayer, to becoming a
practitioner of Eastern meditation, an admirer of mystical traditions
in both eastern and western spirituality, and a proponent of prayers for
healing.
Migraine headaches served as the shot of grace which propelled him forward,
he said. His headaches, which began in childhood, were so bad that at
one point he decided that the only moral, ethical thing he could do was
to drop out of medical school.
“I was afraid I’d end up killing a patient during a surgical
situation,” he explained. His faculty advisor encouraged him to
continue on, assuring him the headaches would get better. They didn’t.
Dossey, however, graduated from Southwestern Medical School in Dallas
in 1967 and before completing his residency went to Vietnam as a battalion
surgeon. In 1969 he received the Army’s Bronze Star and Medal for
Valor. He returned to Dallas and set up his practice in that city. The
albatross of headache pain continued to be a growing burden.
Finally, as he doggedly searched for a cure, Dossey discovered the newly
developing technique of biofeedback in which people are trained to improve
their health by using signals from their bodies with the aid of a biofeedback
machine. The machine acts as a kind of sixth sense which allows them to
pick up on tense muscles or rapid heartbeats, and then use relaxation
techniques to slow down their stress or interrupt the pain.
After several weeks of practicing biofeedback, Dossey’s headaches
tapered off and he became fascinated by this new mind/body approach to
healing. He was so enraptured, in fact, that he studied for certification
in the process and then introduced it to the Humana Medical City Hospital
in Dallas where he served as chief of staff.
During the 1980s, his preoccupation with mind-body connections led him
to discover research on prayer. Someone had sent him a scientific paper
in which prayer was tested in a modern hospital among a large group of
heart patients. Half the patients were prayed for, and the other half
were not. The study suggested a therapeutic effect of prayer, he learned.
While surprised, Dossey remained skeptical, but he continued to pursue
the topic,
discovering more than 130 scientific studies in the general area of healing.
Nineteen of those employed prayer at a distance, and 11 have shown significant
results, he said. Schools conducting these studies have included Duke,
Harvard and Columbia universities.
The studies made a believer out of him. He began praying for his patients,
and by the early 1990s he was writing about his findings. In 1993, he
authored “Healing Words: the Power of Prayer and the Practice of
Medicine.” It was the first of 10 books, his latest being “The
Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things.”
Dossey, who says he always loved to write, gave himself the gift of free
time to pursue his avocation when he retired from internal medicine in
1988. He and his wife, Barbara, moved to Santa Fe, where both of them
are actively involved in health education.
His research and writing have made a major impact on the field of medicine.
When “Healing Words” was published, only three U.S. medical
school courses took time to explore the role of religious practice and
health; currently nearly 80 medical schools have introduced courses, many
of which use his books as study texts.
Despite the fact that healing prayer works in many instances, in many
others, no healing takes place. The entire phenomenon remains a mystery
and needs more study, he said. But in the long run, he added, it will
always remain grounded in the unknowable.
His favorite prayers are those which he refers to as nondirected phrases
– “Thy will be done,” or “May the best things
happen.” In some instances, he said, the best possible outcome might
be for the sick person to die, in order to spare him days or weeks of
agony, when pain medications no longer work.
Asked specifically about the efficacy of praying for peace, especially
in times of war, he replied: “The issue is not answerable in any
logical way. Perhaps if people had not been praying, 12 million people
would have died at Hitler’s hands instead of six million.”
Citing a recent example of Israel’s attack on Lebanon, Dossey suggests
that if prayer had not been working, “perhaps they would be using
nuclear bombs in Lebanon right now.”
He points out that the bottom line concerning prayer is not about praying
for a specific outcome but rather about “connecting with the Absolute,”
whatever that Absolute is called – God, Yahweh, Allah, Jesus, the
Universe, Krishna or Goddess.
“Prayer points like an arrow to the existence of a soul-like quality
in everyone. It affirms the existence of soul, which is one of its greatest
gifts to human welfare,” he believes.
Dr. Larry Dossey
