Larry Dossey, MD
UTMB
Galveston, TX
March 12, 2004

Premise:
Spiritual factors are important in both the prevention and treatment of probably all major illnesses.

The re-spiritualization of medicine:
Recent indicators
• 1993: Only 3/125 medical schools in U. S. A. featured courses in spirituality and health; in 2004, 90 have such.
• 1997: Joint Commission on Accreditation
• 1998: Association of American Medical Colleges
• 1998: Astin survey: “transformational experience”
__________________________________
Astin JA. “Why Patients Use Alternative Medicine — Results of a National Survey.”
Journal of the American Medical Association. 1998; 279(19): 1548-1553.

the sense of connectedness with an absolute, imminent, or transcendent power, however named.
ritualized spirituality; a codified system of belief, worship, and conduct that often includes a sense of the spiritual.

Spirituality & medicine:
What do doctors believe ?
Survey of 296 family physicians:
• 99% are convinced that spiritual beliefs can heal
• 75% believe that prayers of others can help a patient recover
• 38% believe that faith healers can make people well
______________________________________________________
Survey by Yankelovich Partners; American Academy of Family Physicians
Annual meeting, October 1996; Parade Magazine, Dec. 1, 1996.

What do physicians do about spirituality and health?
A random national survey of 1,000 adults found that only 10 percent said that a doctor had ever talked to them about their spiritual beliefs as a factor in physical health.
__________________________
McNichol T. The new faith in medicine.
USA Weekend.
April 5-6, 1996:4-5.

Spirituality & medicine:
What do patients want ?
Survey of hospitalized patients :
• 75% said their physicians should be concerned about their spiritual beliefs.
• 50% said their physician should pray not only for them, but with them.
____________________________________
King DE, Bushwick B. “Beliefs and attitudes of hospital inpatients about faith healing and prayer.” Journal of Family Practice. 1994;
39(4): 349-352.

Spirituality & health:
2 major areas of research
• religious practices, health, & longevity (approx. 1,200 published studies)
( Koenig HG, McCullough ME, Larson DB. Handbook of Religion and Health . New York: Oxford University Press; 2001.)
• prayer & distant healing (approx. 150 published studies )

Those who follow a religious practice
— it does not appear to matter which — live significantly longer (7 to 13 yrs.) and have a lower incidence of major diseases.
———————————————————————————
McCullough ME, Hoyt WT, Larson DB, Koenig H, Thoresen C.
Religious involvement and mortality: A meta-analytic review.
Health Psychology . 2000;19(3):211-222.

Religion & health:
Naturalistic mechanisms
• better health habits
• less smoking and drinking
• dietary precautions; vegetarianism
• social support and networks
• sense of meaning and purpose
_____________________________________
Levin JS, Schiller PL. Is there a religious factor in health? J. Religion and Health.
1987;26:9-36.

E
RA
I M
EDICINE

E
RA
II M
EDICINE

E
RA
III M
EDICINE
)

P

(cultural definition)
Prayer is talking aloud or silently to a white, short-tempered, male, cosmic parent figure,who prefers to be addressed in English.

(ecumenical definition)
.

“[The brain’s] workings — what we sometimes call mind — are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.”
— C ARL S AGAN
____________________________________________________
The Dragons of Eden. New York: Simon & Schuster; 1977:7.

“...a person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make up and influence them.”
— F RANCIS C RICK
______________________________
The Astonishing Hypothesis . New York: Simon
& Schuster; 1994.

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
— Western Union internal memo, 1876

— Lord Kelvin
President, Royal Society, 1895

— Harry M. Warner,
Warner Brothers, 1927

“This wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value.
Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?”
— David Sarnoff’s associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
Irving Fisher,
Professor of Economics,
Yale University, 1929

— Engineer at the
Advanced Computing
Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip,
1968

— Popular Mechanics, 1949, forecasting the relentless march of science

“
— Kenneth Olsen
Founder, Digital Equipment Corp.
(Compaq), 1977

— Bill Gates
Founder and CEO,
Microsoft, 1981

“The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C,’ the idea must be feasible.”
—
A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight express delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

“A cookie store is a bad idea.
Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.”
— Response to Debbie Fields’ idea of starting
Mrs. Fields’ Cookies

Decca Recording Co., rejecting the Beatles,
1962

“At the present state of the investigation of consciousness we don’t know how it works and we need to try all kinds of different ideas.”
— J OHN
S
EARLE
______________________________
J. Consciousness Studies ; 2(1):1995.

“Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness.”
— J ERRY A. F ODOR
______________________________________
The big idea. NY Times Literary Supplement ;
July 3, 1992.

T HE B ENOR S URVEY
(1990)
131 controlled trials of spiritual healing in a variety of species
• 56 show statistically significant results ( P < 0.01)
• 21 show statistically significant results ( P < 0.02-0.05)
________________________________________
Benor DJ. Spiritual Healing. Southfield, MI: Vision; 2002.

Summary as of March 2004:
• Nine randomized controlled clinical trials of distant healing/intercessory prayer in humans have been published; five have yielded statistically significant results.
• Eight systematic or meta-analyses of the human clinical studies have been published; seven have reached positive conclusions.

The big picture:
• Dossey L. REINVENTING MEDICINE .
San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco;
1999.
• Jonas WB, Crawford CC. HEALING,
INTENTION, AND ENERGY MEDICINE:
SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH METHODS
AND CLINICAL APPLICATIONS .
New
York: Churchill Livingstone; 2003.

Randolph C . Byrd
“The Effects of Intercessory
Prayer in a Coronary Care
Unit Population”
______________________
Southern Medical Journal . 1988; 81(7):
826-829.

Mitchell Krucoff, Suzanne Crater, et al.
“Integrative Noetic Therapies as Adjuncts to
Percutaneous Intervention During Unstable
Coronary Syndromes: Monitoring and
Actualization of Noetic Training (MANTRA)
Feasibility Pilot.”
_______________________________________
American Heart Journal. 2001; 142(5): 760-767.

K. Y. Cha, D. P. Wirth, R. Lobo
“Does Prayer Influence the Success of In Vitro Fertilization-Embryo
Transfer? Report of a Masked,
Randomized Trial.”
________________________________________
J. Reproductive Medicine. 2001; 46(9): 781-787.

F. Sicher, E. Targ, D. Moore, H. S. Smith
“ A Randomized Double-blind Study of the Effect of Distant Healing in a Population with Advanced AIDS—
Report of a Small-scale Study.”
___________________________________________
Western Journal of Medicine. 1998; 169(6): 356-363.

Mechanism of Era III events
“Something unknown i s doing we don’t know what.”
— S IR A RTHUR E DDINGTON

“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”
— E MERSON P UGH
________________________
The Biological Origin of Human Values, 1977.

How does it work?
“There is no answer.”
There never has been an answer.
There never will be an answer.
That’s the answer.”
—
G ERTRUDE S TEIN

Consciousness:
Evolving Hypotheses
David J. Chalmers Nick Herbert
Amit Goswami Harald Walach
Robert G. Jahn David Bohm
Russell Targ Ervin Laszlo
Elizabeth Rauscher Brian Josephson
Rupert Sheldrake C. J. S. Clarke
Joop M. Houtkooper Helmut Schmidt
Henry P. Stapp

Consciousness:
Evolving Hypotheses
Consciousness is fundamental in the universe, perhaps on a par with matter and energy. It is not produced by the brain nor reducible to it.
— D
AVID
J
.
C
HALMERS
University of Arizona
____________________________________
Chalmers DJ. The puzzle of conscious experience.
Scientific American . 1995;273(6): 80-6 .

“Skeptics”
“This is the sort of thing
I would not believe, even if it were true.”
—
F
AMOUS
KEPTIC

“Often in science the reaction to a new finding is directly proportional to the strength of the dogma it overturns.
People are still in denial of the theory of relativity, too.”
—
E
LIAS
Z
ERHOUNI
Director, NIH
________________________________________
US News & World Report. November 18, 2002

—
M AX P LANCK

—
A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN

“It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power. We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not....”
—
C
ARL
S
AGAN
_______________________________________
UCLA Commencement Speech, June 14, 1991

Larry Dossey, MD
UTMB
Galveston, TX
March 12, 2004

N
M
•
•

—
E
RWIN
S
CHRöDINGER

“The borders of our minds are ever shifting and many minds can flow into one another … and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.”
— W. B. Y EATS

N
M
•
•

E
M

Caveat
“The ark was made by amateurs and the Titanic by experts.
Don’t wait for the experts.”
— M
URRAY
C
OHEN

Consciousness:
Evolving Hypotheses
“My position [on consciousness] demands a major revolution in physics…. [T]here is something very fundamental missing from current science. Our understanding at this time is not adequate and we’re going to have to move to new regions of science….”
— S
IR
R
OGER
P
ENROSE
___
_________________________________________
Sir Roger Penrose. Quoted in: Karl Giberson. The man who fell to earth. Interview with Sir Roger Penrose. Science & Spirit. March/April;
2003: 34-41.

Consciousness:
Evolving Hypotheses
“The new physics presents prima facie evidence that our human thoughts are linked to nature by nonlocal connections: what a person chooses to do in one region seems immediately to effect what is true elsewhere in the universe….[O]ur thoughts
… DO something.”
— H
ENRY
P
.
S
TAPP
UC-Berkeley
_________________________________________________________________
Stapp HP. Harnessing science and religion: Implications of the new scientific conception of human beings. Research News. Feb. 2001;1(6):8.

Are natural laws violated?
“Today’s physics allows for the existence of
‘paranormal’ phenomena of telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis….The whole concept of ‘nonlocality’ in contemporary physics requires this possibility.”
— O. C OSTA de B EAUREGARD
__________________________________________________________
O. C. de Beauregard. The paranormal is not excluded from physics.
J. Scientific Exploration. 1998;12(2):315-320.

Are natural laws violated?
“If such phenomena indeed occur, no change in the fundamental equations of physics would be needed to describe them.”
— G ERALD F EINBERG
____________________________________________________________
G. Feinberg. Precognition — a memory of things future. In: Quantum
Physics and Parapsychology. L. Oteri (ed.). New York, NY: Para-
Psychology Foundation; 1975:54-73.

Time-displaced events:
B. Olshansky, L. Dossey
“Retroactive Prayer:
A Preposterous Hypothesis?”
______________________________________
British Medical Journal.
Dec. 20, 2003; 327: 1465-68.
Br 5-68.
cal Journal. December 20,
2003;327:1465-68.

“Our poor deaf ears, nor those of any physician in Venice, cannot hear them; thrice fortunate those in London who can.”
— Emilio Parigiano , elderly and eminent Venetian physician, 1635, to the Englishman
William Harvey
, who discovered the circulation of the blood. Parigiano was cynically questioning the existence of heart sounds, which Harvey considered important.

“The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.”
—
Sir John Eric Ericksen,
British surgeon, appointed
Surgeon Extraordinary to
Queen Victoria, 1873

“Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.”
—
Pierre Pachet,
Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.”
— Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil, 1859

“I’m just glad it’ll be Clark
Gable who’s falling on his face and not Gary Cooper.”
—
Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in “Gone With The Wind.”

“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last the year.”
— The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall
1957

“One of my grandmothers was a notorious and successful faith healer. One of my cousins was for many years the editor of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Both these ladies were well educated, highly intelligent, and were fervent believers in paranormal phenomena….Their beliefs were based on personal experience and careful scrutiny of evidence. Nothing that they believed was incompatible with science.”
—
Freeman Dyson
_____________________________________________________________________________
Dyson F. One in a million. The New York Review of Books.
LI (5): March 25, 2004: 4-6.