Prayer as a Healing Force
1996, Larry Dossey, M.D.
This article is taken from Dr. Larry Dossey's remarks
at the July 17, 1996 workshop
"Spirituality, Healing, and the Soul," part of the
Center's series The Healing Force of
Nature. Dr. Dossey serves on the Board of Advisors
for the Center. He is the author of
several bestselling books including Healing Words:
The Power of Prayer and the
Practice of Medicine and its sequel, Prayer is Good
Medicine.
You can't go through years of education here in the U.S. without being
exposed to the idea that
everything is physical. If you have a metaphysical, cosmic experience,
well, that's just a chemical
reaction. If you have a born-again experience, lithium will take care
of it! We come out of our schools
with no appreciation of the mind or even the presence of consciousness.
In reality, you can't find anything in the body that defines consciousness.
It's hard to find anything that
you can pinpoint as "the mind." It's time we admitted that nothing
in chemistry or physics has even a
remote bearing on consciousness. As David Chalmers, a philosopher at
the University of California at
Santa Cruz said in a recent article in Scientific American, it's time
to bite the bullet and admit that
consciousness is another force altogether, on a par with matter and
energy.
When we talk of prayer we are talking about distant manifestations of
consciousness. To talk in this
way is to break some kind of taboo. We can accept the power of the
mind in affecting bodily
processes, but to talk interpersonally--that my consciousness can have
an effect on other persons and
events--is a major paradigm shift.
The first major shift in our thinking about health came in the mid 1800s
when we began to view the
body scientifically and mechanically. You identify what's not working
right and fix it. The second era
brought in the connection between mind and body. We began to talk about
psychosomatic illness. The
third era introduces the idea of non-local medicine.
Local medicine believes that my mind is localized in my brain. Non-local
medicine says that my mind
may not be localized to my brain and body or even to the present moment.
One way to define
intercessory prayer is as a "positive, distant, non-local manifestation
of conciousness." This includes
born-again Christians' prayers as well as the Buddhists'. It can include
rejoicing, talking, silence, be
addressed to God or to the universe. How you pray is up to you.
People get upset with this kind of broad definition. Most people in
this culture define prayer as talking
aloud to oneself or to some white, male parent figure, usually in the
English language. But there are
many cultures and religions with prayer practices. Unless you want
to disenfranchize lots of people,
we need a broader definition. And interestingly, the studies on prayer
show no correlation between
religious affiliation and the effects of prayer in the laboratory.
The factors that seems to work are love,
compassion, empathy and deep caring.
The most famous prayer study was conducted by Dr. Randolph Byrd, a cardiologist
at the University
of California at San Francisco Medical Center. He took 393 people who
had been admitted to the
hospital with a heart attack. All of the subjects received the same
high-tech, state-of-the-art coronary
care, but half were also prayed for by name by prayer groups around
the country. No one knew who
was being prayed for--the patients, the doctors, the nurses. The prayed-for
group had fewer deaths,
faster recovery, less intubations, and used fewer potent medications.
If the subject of this study had been a new medication instead of prayer,
this would have been
considered a medical breaththrough. Up until then, most medical people
had considered prayer a nice
thing. It didn't hurt much, but they certainly didn't consider it a
matter of life and death.
One of the complaints about Byrd's and others' studies is that they
are not rigorously done. In writing
my books I looked at all of the studies, some 160 of them. While it
is true that some have problems,
many are fanatically precise and admirably designed. Two-thirds show
that the impact of distant prayer
is statistically significant.
Some scientists have talked of the "problem of extraneous prayer." How
do we know that those
cardiac patients in the control group weren't being prayed for by friends
and family? People often pray
in a crisis. Now, I for one am glad that this problem of extraneous
prayer exists. If I have a heart
attack, I want to have a lot of this problem! But for research purposes,
scientists have gotten around
this by doing studies of the growth of bacteria in test tubes. That
way you guarantee the purity of the
control group. And you know what? The prayed-for test tube also shows
a reduction in the growth of
bacteria. This kind of study might seem outrageous but this is where
precise science can be done.
Some people have told me, "You can't afford to talk about prayer stuff
like this. You'll make people
feel guilty. What if someone is on this wonderful spiritual path but
the pathology report comes back
positive? They may feel shame and blame and guilt. They may feel they
haven't prayed hard enough or
been spiritual enough. So don't bring it up and make them feel uncomfortable."
I think we who believe in the connection between body, mind and spirit
have to take this problem very
seriously. In some circles there is the belief that if you stay on
a spiritual path everything will turn out
all right. There's even a book that says that you'll never die if you
achieve spiritual perfection. So if you
get sick, that means you had some more spiritual work to do.
We need to say emphatically that there is not a one-to-one correlation.
One's well-being is not just as
simple as being happy and being aware or praying properly. Any model
we create about the
relationship between spiritual achievement and good health has to account
for two groups of people. I
call them the Healthy Reprobates and the Unhealthy Saints. One of the
oldest men on earth lives in
Iraq; he's at least 120 years old and drinks and smokes all the time.
And history is full of very spiritual
people who were sick all the time. In the Bible, Job was described
as perfect, and look what happened
to him. The Buddha died of food poisoning.
We should understand that prayer does have an impact, but it can't save
us from death or guarantee
we won't get sick. There's no historical or clinical evidence that
this is true. I would say to you though,
don't wait for the results of more double-blind studies to pray. We
can stand to have more extraneous
prayer in this world of ours.