Larry Dossey, MD

PETER BARRY CHOWKA: What are your hopes for, and what are you trying to accomplish with, yet another conference on alternative medicine?

LARRY DOSSEY: We want to bring together the "tribe," so to speak. I have a sense that this is a gathering of a community that we're involved in, of like minds, to review the status of the field of alternative medicine and to try to chart some future course. What works? What's the evidence? What directions do we need to be going in? How can we best foster an integration of complementary therapies and orthodox medicine. These are the kinds of questions we're going to be asking.

CHOWKA: I'd like to focus on the word "alternative" when used to describe a kind of medicine. Many of us who use the term "alternative" feel that it's ironic at best because in many cases the therapies we're referring to are really truly traditional. Moreover, it is conventional medicine that in many ways is an alternative to most of the long traditions of healing that in this century have tended to be shunted aside, here in the West, at least.

Are you troubled by the term "alternative?" Do you think it puts us at a disadvantage? Do you see a time in the future when the language that we use might be more appropriate, that we will move away from the word "alternative?"

DOSSEY: I can't think of a term that's worse than "alternative." It suggests a polarization and an either/or approach. I don't know anybody doing serious work in this field who is really comfortable with that idea. I think most of us like to think that we use what works. And in any given situation there's usually more than one thing that will work. So we like to think in terms of a complementary and a both/and approach.

The favorite term in England is "complementary" medicine. The reason that we seem to be stuck with the very inaccurate term "alternative" is because Congress named the Office of Alternative Medicine that. We didn't choose the term. It was inflicted on this new office and I'm afraid we're stuck with it

Wayne Jonas, M.D., the new director of the Office of Alternative Medicine, is thinking about a name change. I hope that we can get away from the term. So look for that to happen. That's my prediction

CHOWKA: You have said that while in medical school you were first exposed to Buddhism, Taoism, and Eastern and Western mystics, and that after medical school you served in Vietnam in a medical capacity. Is there a link between your discovery here of the so-called perennial wisdom traditions and your experience soon afterwards in Southeast Asia?

DOSSEY: I can't say that there's a direct link. There are a few indirect links. For instance, strange things kept happening to me when I was in the front lines, functioning as a battalion surgeon, in Vietnam. The military would send boxes of books out to the troops. Usually these would be science fiction books and Westerns. But occasionally there would be a book on mysticism that would be among the Westerns. And I would always be the first person to go through the boxes of books that came out to the fire bases.

It almost seemed to me that these books were sent to me personally. These were rare coincidences. I have no idea how it happened. For instance, I remember reading a famous book, The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard De Chardin. How the United States military sent this book out to the front line befuddles me. But these are the kinds of things that happened during my experience in Vietnam that seemed to constitute a pattern of discovery in these areas.

CHOWKA: You are the author of five books beginning with Space, Time and Medicine in 1982 through Healing Words, the 1993 New York Times list best seller. How has your thinking and your approach to "alternative medicine" evolved through the five books?

DOSSEY: The evolution, I think, has to do with the extent and the nature of consciousness on processes, not just in the body, but in the world in general. I first began to explore these issues in terms of the effects of an individual's consciousness on his or her own body. I was interested, for instance, in meditation and hypnosis. After that, I explored imagery, visualization, and so on.

But more recently it's become obvious to me that there is strong data suggesting that consciousness works not only in our own bodies, on our own behalf, but consciousness is what I call non-local in the world. It can manifest _ouside_ an individual's body. So when we look at the effects of consciousness we have to go beyond looking at the effects of our mind on our body. Recently my books have explored this expression of consciousness through distant or intercessory prayer which involves the ability of your consciousness to make an impact on my body at a distance through prayer when I may not even know that you are doing this.

These ideas seem outrageous in the context of modern science but I think that there's significant experimental evidence that these phenomena in fact takes place and that they're relevant for health.

CHOWKA: I want to explore the genesis of your latest book, Healing Words. In an article in Newsday (Dec. 21, 1993) you described how in 1988 you became aware of a study of cardiac patients who had been prayed for. You noted that the outcome of the study, which was randomized and double blinded, was "as if the prayed for group had been given some sort of miracle drug." According to the Newsday article, this study sent you on an almost five year quest to determine if that study stood alone or if there were others like it.

In 1995 you presided at a conference in New York on "Spirtuality and Healing: What is the Connection?" According to he program, you planned to "examine laboratory evidence that there is an aspect of each one of us that is unconfined to points in space and time that appears eternal, immortal, and omnipresent and that corresponds to the ancient idea of the soul." You also promised to ". . .look at cases of successful treatments involving prayer and meditation that do not align with any current medical theories."

In terms of what you started out to look for in 1988, to see if there was more evidence for the healing power of prayer, it would appear that you have found it.

DOSSEY: When I discovered the study in 1988 showing that if people who were really sick, for instance in the coronary care unit, were prayed for unknown to them, they got better -- according to a randomized, controlled, prospective, matched double blind study. I went to the [scientific] literature. If you do this, you may be shocked at what you can find. There are as many as 150 studies showing, statistically speaking, that there is an effect of distant intercessory prayer.

I began to ruminate about the implications of this discovery. My conclusion is that the significance of this effect lies far beyond whether or not when you pray for someone the cancer goes away, or heart disease heals -- that's terrific; but the implications are shocking compared to that. What's involved, that some aspect of the consciousness can reach out beyond the body, irrespective of space and make this kind of difference? I think we have to say that there are simply things that consciousness can mediate or consciousness can do that the brain or the body are incapable of. This is a way of saying that the mind is more than the brain and the body.

There's also evidence that the mind can violate not just spatial separation but also temporal divisions and barriers. There's evidence that the mind can reach back into time and reconfigure events at the quantum level which have not yet been observed even though we presume that they've already happened.

This may sound outrageous to somebody who encounters this statement for the first time. But one can be sobered by looking at the experimental evidence. If you reason all of this through I think you can easily come to a place where you say "there's some quality of our mind and consciousness that's simply outside of space and time." If you go to this line of thinking in conclusion it seems to me that you've reinvented the idea of the soul. We've said, at least in the West, that the soul is some aspect of who we are that doesn't die, it has no beginning and no end. And this is basically the quality that I think we see flowing out of these kinds of experiements.

Now, I'll grant you we don't have a "soul meter" yet, we can't plug into somebody and get a direct read out of whether or not they've got a soul. But if you look at the implications of these experiments, I think they clearly point to a soul like quality in human beings. It seems to me that the implications are absolutely wonderful and magnificent. Great implications for immortality, for eternality -- the idea that it isn't all over with the physical death of the brain and body. These implications, it seems to me, dwarf whatever practical value prayer might have. If we pray and we get better, I think that's terrific -- we ought to use prayer in that way. _But_ if you pray and the cancer gets worse and you die, you may just have to settle for immortality!

CHOWKA: Speaking on that practical level, especially for people who might be reading this kind of material for the first time and wanting to know how, pragmatically, on the physical level prayer could possibly help them with an illnes -- how do you explain or is there a way of coherently explaining for the lay mind at this point the physiology of how prayer, how attention to and summoning the power of the mind and spirit, can influence the body and foster healing? Do these things work directly on the immune system?

DOSSEY: It helps to bear in mind that there are several kinds of prayer. The two main divisions that I would want to bring out are petitionary prayer, where you petition for something for yourself. You pray for something for you. And then there's this more outrageous kind of prayer, which has been called intercessory prayer or prayer at a distance for someone else.

When you pray for yourself, a lot of things happen. Setting aside for the moment whether or not God, or Goddess, or a supreme being might be involved in petitionary prayer when you pray for yourself, we know that certain things happen. You think positively. And positive thoughts aren't confined to your brain. They sets in motion a chain of events that has been defined physiologically. We know that expectation and suggestion achieve a lot of fabulous changes in the immune system and probably every other organ in the body.

When you get into a meditative, prayer like, contemplative frame of mind the metabolism slows down, the immune system is refreshed, the blood pressure and heart rates subside, blood lactate level falls, and oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production are diminished. A lot of changes happen, the result of which is that the body becomes healthier. We're not totally in the dark about some of these physiological effects.

I think most people probably aren't interested in that level. They want to know, "When I pray, does it work or not?" I think that if you look at the evidence, you can resoundingly say, "Yup! This has a healful effect and here's the laboratory proof for that."

The bottom line, Peter, is that prayer is good for people. You know, we've always had problems in science saying this. But there is profound and compelling evidence that this is so. When people pray, good things happen to the body. Does the disease aways go away? Of course not. Nothing is 100 percent. But we can show that, statistically speaking, prayer has a powerful, healthful effect on the body.

CHOWKA: Your recent work is in the mind-spirit end of alternative healing, although, as we've discussed, it has clear relevance to the body, too, to the physical being. How does the healing power of prayer fit into the broader field of alternative healing which, for many people, involves primarily physical medicine, like taking nutritional supplements or having a massage? What do you think the newest discoveries about the power of spiritual healing indicate about the potential for the entire field of alternative medicine?

DOSSEY: I would like to remind my colleagues in alternative and complementary therapies that no therapy acts solely on its own. I think that a conscientous therapist, what I would call a true healer, always brings something of his own intentionality and his own healing instinct, his healing power, to the table whenever he gives an herb or uses an acupuncture needle or administers a homeopathic remedy. So I think that there's no way to disintangle the healing power of the therapist from whatever tool or specific therapy he or she may be using.

I know that there are a lot of New Age therapists out there, and holistic therapists, and alternative and complementary therapists who like to place all of the credit on the remedy or the technique. We like to cheer on whatever technique it is we're using and say "This is really powerful. This works." I don't think it's that simple. Whether you're a doctor writing a prescription for a pill, or an alternative and complementary therapist using homeopathy, I think your consciousness, your intentionality, your positive thoughts and emotions and prayers get into that therapeutic mix whether you know it or not.

CHOWKA: In looking for a shorthand way to define what we're talking about here today and about your work, is it fair to say that Western science is now finding mechanisms, tools, and language to better understand and explain the miraculous? At the same time, do you think that what you and your colleagues are studying, measuring, and writing about will ever be totally explainable?

DOSSEY: I feel that we will get to the point where we will acknowledge the data. Science is terrific at showing whether or not something happens. For instance, does distant intercessory prayer have an effect? Well, science is great at answering that. And we're giving a yes answer to that. I'm less enthusiastic, however, about whether or not we're ever going to be able to come to a full understanding about how that actually happens. For instance there are phenomena in modern physics at the level of quantum physics -- the understanding of the very small, the subatomic domain -- where we see things that clearly happen, but we don't have a clue about _how_ they happen. There's an area called Belts' (sp?) theorem, where you separate two electrons to fantastic distances and you change one and (snaps finger) -- instantly, the other one changes. There's no time for a signal to pass between them. How does one know when the other is changing? Well, we don't have a clue. But scientists acknowledge that this happens in experiment after experiment.

The same thing happens with distant intercessory prayer. How on earth does it take place? It's probably inconceivable to most scientists how it happens. So, you see, we have occasions in science to acknowledge the phenomenon and to honor its existence without even having a theory and an an understanding about how it happens. I think we will acknowledge that many of these so-called miracles occur without a full understanding of why. I'm sort of a science junkie and I'd love to have the reasoning behind all of this. We may be a long time in getting it, if ever.

CHOWKA: I'm reminded here in our discussion of healing and of individual people of the opposite end of the universe, the cosmos, the infinity. In the news this week was the discovery by the Hubble telescope in space billions of new galaxies, many more than were thought to exist, billions of light years away. The mind struggles to come to grips with the infinite nature of space and how even our best minds in science are inadequate in explaining what's going on.

DOSSEY: You know, Peter, it's great to bring this up. There's a point where we have to admit, I think, that our knowledge of the visible world is just a smattering of what we need to know to understand these mysterious things we're talking about. Another area in science which brings this out is the discovery of what has been called dark matter. Astrophysicists and astronomers now believe that ninety percent of the matter that makes up the universe is entirely invisible. It doesn't interact with anything, it doesn't make our instruments tweak or go off. Physicists are theorizing that another completely new kind of physics may be required to describe ninety percent of the matter that's here.

So, for the past 2,000 years we may have been focusing on only ten percent of the matter. We've devoted immense energy to understanding matter. But we have neglected, not even suspecting that it's out there, ninety percent of what is present in the universe without a clue as to the physics which truly governs it.

So, we may be at sea for a very long time in understandng a lot of the other phenomena around us.

CHOWKA: At least there will be a good future for universities and academicians.

DOSSEY: I wouldn't shut them down yet. There are a lot of questions that need to be asked.

continued in Part Two.