Ties sought between medicine, miracles
Published: March 8, 2007
Dr. Larry Dossey believes there is more to medicine than meets the eye.
An internist who served as a battalion surgeon in the Vietnam War, he helped establish the Dallas Diagnostic Association and was the chief of staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital.
But in the 1980s, Dr. Dossey began to look at some of medical science’s unanswered questions.
How, for example, does a doctor explain a “miracle cure”?
“Almost all physicians possess a lavish list of strange happenings unexplainable by normal science,” said Dr. Dossey, who will speak in Toledo Tuesday evening.
In an interview this week, the doctor said that in his first year of medicine he was assigned an elderly hospital patient whose lung cancer was so widespread that he could offer no medical treatment.
“There was nothing that could be done for this man. He wanted nothing, just to go home and die,” Dr. Dossey said. “The only treatment, if you call it that, is that the congregation from his church would come visit him during all visiting hours and ring his bedside and pray like crazy for this man.
“So I sent him home, expecting him to be dead in two or three days. I was shocked when, a year later, a colleague of mine said, ‘You need to come by and see your old patient. He’d really like to chat with you.’ ”
The man he had given up for dead was in the hospital with the flu but completely free of lung cancer, Dr. Dossey said.
“We compared his new chest X-ray with his old one. The new one was clear,” he said, even though the patient had undergone no chemotherapy, no radiation therapy, and no surgery.
“There are all sorts of ways to try to understand these things, but it’s only an anecdote,” he said. “There’s no scientific evidence that prayer did the trick. It’s sort of hard to walk away from these things, but we doctors try because there’s no scientific means to explain it.”
Dr. Dossey, 66, said medical experts began studying such cases in earnest in the mid-1980s. A landmark study was published in 1988 by Dr. Randolph Byrd of the coronary care unit of San Francisco General Hospital.
Dr. Byrd recruited people to pray for patients in the coronary care unit but did not tell the patients they were being prayed for. The study found that patients who received prayer fared better than those who were not prayed for, Dr. Dossey said.
“This was actually a shock to me,” he said. “I never imagined anyone in their right mind would attempt to do a study like this, and it caught me flat-footed.”
More than 20 scientific studies have followed, he said, and today the impact of prayer and spirituality on physical healing is a popular topic in medical science.
Dr. Dossey has written 10 books on the impact of the mind and spirituality on health, starting with the 1993 New York Times bestseller, Healing Words.
“When that book came out, only three of the 125 medical schools in the United States had any course work looking at correlations of religious and spiritual practices with regard to health outcomes,” Dr. Dossey said. “Currently, over 90 have developed formal courses exploring these connections.”
He said there are still many unanswered questions.
For example, there is no evidence that any particular religion’s prayers are more effective than others.
“Whether a person is a born again Christian, Hindu, Jew, or Muslim, there’s not a shred of evidence to point to any advantage of one faith or another,” Dr. Dossey said.
The doctor described himself as “not a religious person … but I subscribe to a deep spiritual sense in my life, a deep personal connection with what I consider to be a transcendent being.”
He has been focusing on writing for the last 15 years and no longer practices medicine. His most recent book is The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things, published last year by Random House.
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