Larry Dossey, MD

The Interview by Peter Barry Chowka

Introduction

In 1995, the Office of Alternative Medicine at the prestigious National Institutes of Health (NIH) published a major book, Alternative Medicine: Expanding Medical Horizons. According to the chapter on "Mind-Body Interventions,"

"During the past 30 years, there has been a powerful scientific movement to explore the mind's capacity to affect the body and to rediscover the ways in which it permeates and is affected by all of the body's function."

Larry Dossey, MD is largely responsible for the current success and the accelerating growth of this movement.

Perhaps more than anyone else, Dossey's life and career seem to perfectly mirror the best elements of the emerging field of alternative medicine: grounded in the West, experienced in the East, open-minded and -hearted, expansive, affirming, and positive -- and ultimately down-to-earth and reality based about the whole mysterious and miraculous process of life itself.

Dossey's intriguing personal evolution in many ways parallels the transformation that is occurring in much of Western medicine. A product of a traditional, fundamentalist rural Texas upbringing, Dossey graduated from Southwestern Medical School in Dallas in 1967, after which he served as a battlefield surgeon in Vietnam and later completed his residency in internal medicine at the Veterans Administration Hospital and Parkland Hospital in Dallas. In the 1970s he practiced conventional medicine with the Dallas Diagnostic Association and was Chief of Staff at Medical City Dallas Hospital.

Having been exposed in the 1960s to Eastern thought and several early and at the time controversial, nontoxic therapeutic approaches, particularly biofeedback, Dossey gradually and continually expanded his awareness and practice of alternative, holistic, and mind-body forms of healing. In 1982 he wrote Space, Time and Medicine, the first of five major books -- a sixth is being published this year -- all of which chart promising research and innovative options for a high-tech Western medical science that had become increasingly unresponsive and desperate for new ideas and effective treatments.

Professionally and personally, Dossey is well suited to a pioneering and high profile role as a clinical investigator and a popularizer of unconventional scientific and medical ideas. He is articulate, impressive, telegenic, soft-spoken, and reassuring. His books are a hit and so is he, on the lecture circuit and in a wide variety of major national electronic media appearances, including with Oprah Winfrey and Larry King and on NBC TV's Dateline. In addition, Dossey has managed to consistently maintain scientific credibility and integrity in the conservative and closely regulated world of mainstream medicine (no easy feat), culminating in his appointment as co-chair of the NIH panel on Mind-Body Interventions at the government's new Office of Alternative Medicine in 1992 and his role as founder and editor of a successful peer reviewed medical journal, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, three years later.

It was in January 1996, the day before his medical journal's first annual professional meeting in San Diego, that Dossey and I met for a one on one interview. He was gracious and easy to talk to, and I enjoyed our conversation immensely. But my respect for him grew substantially during the next three days as the conference proceeded, exceeding both projected attendance figures and one's expectations for content, substance, and excitement. Ultimately, the gathering emerged as one of the most dynamic and inspiring scientific meetings I've attended in over two decades. It was, many participants agreed, largely due to the careful nurturing and positive hands on influence of the ultimately unassuming Dr. Dossey.

Having started in mind-body healing -- involving, in addition to biofeedback, things like visualization and therapeutic touch -- Dossey has lately studied and done a lot to popularize the truly leading edge field of the healing efects of prayer. It may sound radical and even bizarre at first, to suggest that praying -- including at long distance for someone who doesn't even know he or she is being prayed for -- can have a therapeutic, even curative, effect. But then there is the evidence that most Americans pray regularly and increasingly when they or a loved one are ill, and that prayer is associated with a large number of otherwise inexplicable healings, many of them in closely controlled clinical test enviornments. These findings put Dossey's innovative explorations and startling conclusions into a very different, even ironically traditional and reasurringly religious, light -- one that Americans can apparently digest without too much distress.

Ultimately, and perhaps most significantly, Dossey and his colleagues in mind body healing are succeeding, perhaps without ever quite intending to, in pushing the envelope for all of alternative medicine -- including advocating a new, less perjorative name for the field, Complementary Alternative Medicine (CAM), which the NIH is starting to adopt.

After years of controversy and neglect, it's an exciting time for everyone involved in alternative healing. And before it's even half over, 1996 is emerging as the most lively and intense period in modern history for public and political interest in and professional acceptance of alternative medicine. The signs of positive momentum are numerous and unmistakable, and suggest that we're on the verge of a major shift in mainstream conventional medicine's attitudes toward CAM.

Writing this introduction, three months after my interview with Larry Dossey at the beginning of the year, I keep thinking that the medical meeting where our conversation took place was in many ways both prescient and predictive of alternative medicine's increasingly positive and professional tone and its unprecedented degree of significance in the year ahead.

Peter Barry Chowka

Select this URL to read Q & A Part One of Peter Barry Chowka's Interview with Larry Dossey, M.D.

Select this URL to return to Peter Barry Chowka's Home Page.