Product Description

In this groundbreaking classic linking prayer and health, physician Larry Dossey shares the latest evidence connecting prayer, healing, and medicine. Using real-life examples and personal anecdotes, Dossey proves how prayer can be as valid a healing tool as drugs or surgery.

Dossey explores which methods of prayer show the greatest potential for healing; presents compelling evidence that patients' and doctors' belief in a treatment increases its efficacy; explains that discoveries in modern physics allow us to integrate the spiritual and the scientific and make the power of prayer provable in the lab; and much more.

Provocative, engaging, and powerfully instructive, Healing Words restores the spiritual art of healing to the science of medicine.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #136477 in Books
• Published on: 1997-12-01
• Released on: 1997-10-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 432 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780061043833
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Kirkus Reviews
Physician Dossey (Medicine and Meaning, 1991, etc.) continues to probe links between medicine and spirituality in this popular study of the healing power of prayer. Prayer heals? Hardly news in the religious world, where Hebrew Bible and New Testament alike attest to prayer's medicinal effects. But for science, it's a revelation, one confirmed by dozens of laboratory experiments that Dossey cites. Prayer can help with high blood pressure, asthma, heart attacks, headaches, and anxiety; moreover, it can alter enzyme activity, blood cell growth, and the germination of seeds. Dossey rejects the traditional Judeo-Christian notion of prayer as a relationship to a transcendental God, offering instead his own quasi-pantheistic view of prayer as a ``genuinely nonlocal event'' directed to the ``Absolute'' in all things. In any case, prayer apparently works: Even unconscious or dream prayer, it seems, can be effective. At the same time, prayers often remain unfulfilled, and Dossey blasts New Agers for preaching that illness is the patient's fault and that physical health always reflects spiritual health, pointing out that many saints have suffered from terrible physical or emotional maladies. An attitude of reverence and optimism is the best approach, he says, to spiritual and physical well-being. Not likely to sway hard-core materialists, especially when Dossey dips into the deep end by asserting that patients can rewrite their medical histories by ``intervening in subatomic processes in the past.'' Nonetheless, this raises new questions (Should you ask permission before praying for someone else? Should a physician pray for his patients?) about an old but little-studied phenomenon. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Larry Dossey, M.D., is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Healing Words, and Prayer Is Good Medicine. An authority on spiritual healing, he lectures throughout the country and has been a frequent guest on Oprah, Good Morning America, CNN, and The Learning Channel. He is responsible for introducing innovations in spiritual care to acclaimed institutions across the country. He currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Saints and Sinners,
Health and Illness

What is to give light must endure burning.
-- Viktor Frankl

One of the most puzzling illnesses in history took place some 2,500 years ago when the Buddha-the Awakened One -- died from food poisoning, having been fed tainted meat in what proved to be his final meal. Not a very exalted way for a Buddha to go, I thought, on first discovering this account. Somehow I'd expected a more dignified cause of death than spoiled food. Later I found that this case was by no means unique, and that many great spiritual leaders have suffered ignominious ends marked by grotesque pain and suffering. Some of the historically recent examples include:

--Saint Bernadette, who in 1858 saw the vision of the Virgin at Lourdes, where thousands of healings are claimed to have occurred. Bernadette didn't receive such a healing when she needed one. Cause of death: variously called "bone cancer" or disseminated tuberculosis, at age thirty-five.

-- Jiddu Krishnamurti, the famous spiritual teacher whose words have inspired millions around the world. Cause of death: cancer of the pancreas.

--Suzuki Roshi, who brought Zen Buddhism from Japan to the United States and established the San Francisco Zen Center. Cause of death: cancer of the liver.

-- Sri Ramana Maharshi, the most beloved saint of modem India. Cause of death: cancer of the stomach.

This list could be multiplied at great length. History is clear: the health records of many of the most majestic, God-realized saints and mystics are far from ideal.

Often the sickly saints seem to accept illness as part of the natural order. The great Indian sage Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), one day took a wrong step, fell, and broke his knee. This perplexed the physician who attended him. "How is it that you, a mahatma, could not foresee and prevent this accident?" "I still have to carry this human body about me," Aurobindo replied, "and it is subject to ordinary human limitations and physical laws."

The "explanations" offered for these events are numerous. Some say the saint or mystic wasn't really as spiritual as he or she seemed. Or that he or she was indeed enlightened but was living out his or her karma, "paying back" for transgressions and shortcomings of previous lives. Others maintain that the great teacher has inadvertently taken on the illness of his or her devotees, like an unconscious sponge. We also hear the argument that the wise one has consciously chosen the illness. Sometimes this is done as a teaching device, in order to demonstrate that the connection between the divine and the human can remain even in the midst of hideous illness. Or the saint or mystic intentionally takes on the illness as a final test, to "bum off " any remaining vestiges of ego or self-consciousness.

These may or may not be valid reasons. Our task here is not to figure out in every case why God-realized people get sick and die, but simply to acknowledge that they obviously do -- and to ask what this might imply when illness occurs in our own lives. Above all, these accounts should make us question seriously the prevalent assumptions that (a) being holy is a guarantee of good health, and that (b) bad health and illness always imply spiritual shortcomings.

These assumptions are untrue not just for spiritual geniuses, but also for common folk like you and me. When Jesus encountered a man who was blind from birth, his disciples asked, "Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" This question comes in a variety of "New Age" contexts today. Who is at fault? Why did I "choose" this illness? For what current or previous shortcomings am I suffering? Who's to blame? Jesus' answer is illuminating, and should be emblazoned in every New Age book dealing with consciousness and healing: "Neither bath this man sinned, nor his parents. but that the works of God should be made manifest in him" (John 9:1-3, King James Version (KJV), emphasis added). How could Jesus' message be clearer? This is a striking example of a profound physical problem in the total absence of spiritual imperfection. No one fell short, nobody was being punished for sin, nobody chose to be sick. Jesus implies also that there may be a higher purpose to the illness that we simply cannot grasp because we do not know the ways of the Absolute. This means that the meaning of a particular disease may be cosmic-that is, it may be opaque and hidden to us mortals, known only to the Divine. On balance, this case warns against equating spiritual and physical health, and cautions us against attributing shallow, superficial meaning to illness.

But the sickly saints and mystics are only one side of the coin. They are mirrored by what we could call the healthy reprobates -- individuals who have no obvious spiritual inclinations whatever, but who never get sick. Almost everyone knows or has heard of such a person. They break all the rules of good health, smoke and drink with abandon, and five to be a hundred without ever falling ill.

Sickly saints and healthy sinners show us that there is no invariable, linear, one-to-one relationship between one's level of spiritual attainment and the degree of one's physical health. It is obvious that one can attain immense spiritual heights and still get very sick.

Many people who believe in an invariable relationship between physical health and spiritual attainment accept the concept of "the Divine within," " the belief that an element or quality of the Supreme Being dwells inside every human. But even though the Divine may be present in everyone, it is obvious that human beings are imperfect reflectors, as it were, of the Divine Light. We fall short every day in a million ways. just as we may contain an element of the Divine, our physical bodies may contain something of our spiritual essence, which they sometimes reflect as imperfectly as we reflect the Divine.

Customer Reviews

One of the very very best self-healing books!
I've known Larry (the author) since the old times when everyone in medicine seemed to scoff professionally at his interest in the healing power of prayer. Now, quite rapidly, science is catching up with Larry's insights, and we realize just how powerfully our thoughts, spiritual and otherwise, influence our physical bodies.

Larry's book still stands as a classic presentation of the power of prayer in healing. His text offers a very complete presentation of the large amount of research that has in fact been conducted, to prove the power of prayer. And from reading this book, you discover from the studies, what works and what doesn't, which prayer variables are active and which don't matter ... really astounding insights come from this book - plus pragmatic guidelines for how we can all use our own minds and our link with the divine, no matter our particular religious preference, for helping us gain and maintain optimum health - and helping others as well.

Nonlocal mind and the (possible) power of prayer
It's probably tempting to dismiss this book as "New Age" claptrap. That would be a mistake.

In fact Dossey is highly critical of the "New Age" movement. And despite some overblown cover blurbs, he doesn't claim to have "proven" anything about the power of prayer in healing; he's making suggestions and exploring possibilities, not laying down law.

Nor, for the most part, is his speculation wild or unfounded. His suggestions are founded on two things: empirical research that seems to show prayer is effective in promoting the biological growth of certain forms of life under controlled laboratory conditions, and the theological/philosophical view that reality is ultimately a single, universal, "nonlocal" Absolute Mind.

However controversial these foundations might be, he presents his suggestions with proper caution. And he is especially careful to avoid falling into the New Age blame-the-patient trap; he is well aware that prayer doesn't always achieve the results we might like and that this isn't because somebody has done something to "choose" or "deserve" ill health.

On the contrary, he has a healthy sense that prayer is really (though this language isn't quite his) for the purpose of adjusting us to the Divine Will rather than vice-versa. (Anthony de Mello tells a story somewhere about a man who said, "In your country it is regarded as a miracle when God does the will of a human being. In my country it is regarded as a miracle when a human being does the will of God.") On his view, the "power" of prayer is shown as much in our acceptance of our health limitations as in their elimination.

There are a couple of places where Dossey threatens to wander off the deep end (e.g. his suggestion that prayer can change the past), and there's a little bit of language (e.g. "Era I, Era II, and Era III") that recalls bad 1970s self-help books. But I really have only one bone to pick with Dossey: he tends at times to overstate the difference between his views and those of traditional, "classical" theism.

There is a tendency among those (of whom I am one, which is in part how I know this) who left their childhood religions in their early teens to assume, more or less unconsciously, that our understanding of such religion was complete at that time and none of its adherents understood any of the cool things we went on to discover for ourselves. It's hard to shake one's implicit belief that those hidebound "fundamentalists" couldn't _possibly_ have known any of this nifty "spirituality" stuff; "dogmatic" religion is, of course, the arch-enemy of "true" spirituality -- isn't it?

Dossey has a very mild tendency in this direction. In consequence I suspect he will occasionally leave more traditional religious believers with the sense that they are being misunderstood, patronized, or both.

But it doesn't happen very often, and it hardly happens at all in this book. On the whole, Dossey's approach tends to confirm rather than undermine the great theistic religions' view of prayer.

A wealth of information on prayer-based healing!
Dr. Dossey explains in HEALING WORDS how prayer-based healing works. It has been scientifically proven in hundreds of experiments to be a balanced part of health care that can significantly decrease health problems and significantly improve our quality and quantity of life. Dossey shares some of his own real-life stories of caring for patients... including an American Indian shaman, who requested Dr. Dossey's medical help for his aching neck! This book contains a wealth of information about prayer experiments written in Dossey's characteristically down-to-Earth style. I love the way Dossey raises questions about whether some prayer experiments are ethical, and why some scientists continue to resist the mounting body of evidence that so clearly shows how prayer has a powerful effect on healing.