Why Distant Healing?Why Now?
Larry Dossey, MD
UTMBGalveston, TXMarch 12, 2004
Premise:
Spiritual factors are important in both the prevention and treat-ment 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.
Spirituality: the sense of connectedness with an absolute, imminent, or transcendent power, however named.
Religion: 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 PhysiciansAnnual 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)
Religion & health:
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 religiousfactor in health? J. Religion and Health. 1987;26:9-36.
ERA I MEDICINE
(Mechanical)
ERA II MEDICINE
(Mind-Body)
ERA III MEDICINE
( Nonlocal )
Prayer:
What is it?
Prayer(cultural definition)
Prayer is talking aloud or silently
to a white, short-tempered,male, cosmic parent figure,who
prefers to be addressed in English.
Prayer(ecumenical definition)
…communication with the Absolute.
“[The brain’s] workings — what we sometimes call mind — are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.”
— CARL SAGAN
____________________________________________________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.”
— FRANCIS CRICK______________________________The Astonishing Hypothesis. New York: Simon & Schuster; 1994.
What have experts said?
“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
“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
— Lord Kelvin President, Royal Society, 1895
“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”
— 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
“But what…is it good for?”
— Engineer at the Advanced Computing
Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip,
1968
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
— Thomas Watson President, IBM, 1943
“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
— Popular Mechanics, 1949, forecasting the relentless march of science
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in the home.”
— Kenneth Olsen Founder, Digital Equipment Corp. (Compaq), 1977
“Six hundred forty K ought to be enough for anybody.”
— 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
“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”
— 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.”
— JOHN SEARLE
______________________________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.”
— JERRY A. FODOR______________________________________The big idea. NY Times Literary Supplement;July 3, 1992.
THE BENOR SURVEY (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 thehuman 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.
How does it work?
Mechanism of Era III events
“Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
— SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON
“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”
— EMERSON PUGH________________________ 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.”
— GERTRUDE STEIN
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.
— DAVID J. CHALMERS
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.”
— FAMOUS SKEPTIC
“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.”
— ELIAS ZERHOUNI Director, NIH
________________________________________
US News & World Report. November 18, 2002
… science changes funeralby funeral….
— MAX PLANCK
“It is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom.”
— ALBERT EINSTEIN
“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....”
— CARL
SAGAN _______________________________________UCLA Commencement Speech, June 14, 1991
thank you
thank you
Why Distant Healing?Why Now?
Larry Dossey, MD
UTMBGalveston, TXMarch 12, 2004
NONLOCAL MIND
• Omnipresent
• Eternal, immortal
“Mind by its very nature is a singulare tantum. I should say, the over-all number of minds is just one.”
— ERWIN SCHRöDINGER
“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. YEATS
After the miracles — what then?
NONLOCAL MIND
• Omnipresent
• Eternal, immortal
ETERNITY
MEDICINE
Caveat
“The ark was made by amateurs and the Titanic by experts. Don’t wait for the experts.”
— MURRAY COHEN
Consciousness: Evolving Hypotheses
“My position [on consciousness] demands a major revolution in physics…. [T]here is something very fundamental missing fromcurrent science. Our understanding at this time is not adequate and we’re going to have to move to new regions of science….”
— SIR ROGER PENROSE
____________________________________________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.”
— HENRY P. STAPP 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, precog-nition, and psychokinesis….The whole conceptof ‘nonlocality’ in contemporary physics requires this possibility.”
— O. COSTA de BEAUREGARD
__________________________________________________________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 changein the fundamental equations of physicswould be needed to describe them.”
— GERALD FEINBERG
____________________________________________________________G. Feinberg. Precognition — a memory of things future. In: QuantumPhysics 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.Br5-68.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, appointedSurgeon 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. Draketried 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 decisionnot to take the leading role in “Gone With The Wind.”
“I have traveled the length andbreadth of this country and talkedwith 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.
