Marrying Miracles and Science:
The Healing Power of Intention and Prayer

An Interview with Larry Dossey, M.D.

By Ravi Dykema

Can praying for someone increase his or her chances of recovering from an illness? Does positive intention influence the outcome of disease? And can we create miracles in healing through the power of our minds? A growing body of scientific evidence is suggesting that we can.

At the forefront of this research is Larry Dossey, M.D., the nation’s most widely respected authority on prayer in medicine. "I used to believe that we must choose between science and reason on one hand, and spirituality on the other, in how we lead our lives,” Dossey says. “Now I consider this a false choice. We can recover the sense of sacredness, not just in science, but in perhaps every area of life."

For more than three decades, Dossey has headed a field of study that examines the impact of the mind and spirit on the physical body. He says, “I’ve been on the edge of research and thinking in medicine all of my professional life. This doesn’t get you a lot of peer adulation. I simply love being on what I consider the cutting edge.”

Dossey is the author of nine books–including the best-selling Healing Words (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997)–and numerous articles, and is the former executive editor of the peer-reviewed journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, the most widely subscribed-to journal in its field.

His latest book, The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things (Harmony, 2006) examines 14 everyday, easily accessible sources of well-being. As one of the most influential and highly regarded doctors of our generation, Dossey has acted as an ambassador from the world of alternative healing, bringing scientific credibility to what some would otherwise consider implausible theories.

Dossey will be appearing as the keynote speaker at the Nexus Holistic Expo, on Saturday, February 11, at 7:30 p.m., at the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder. Find more info on page 5 or online at NexusHolisticExpo.com.

Here, Dossey shares his views on medical research, miracles in medicine and his experiences with the power of prayer.

What the science says about intercessory prayer Many scientific studies support the power of intention and intercessory prayer. Some compelling examples: • In one study, 11 healers from the island of Hawaii selected a person they knew, with whom they felt a compassionate, bonded connection, to be the recipient of their healing efforts. Each recipient was placed in an MRI scanner and was isolated from all forms of sensory contact with the healer. The healers sent healing, which the researchers called distant intentionality (DI), at two-minute, random intervals that were unknown to the recipient. Significant changes in brain function between the experimental (send) and control (no send) conditions were found. This study suggests that compassionate, healing intentions can exert measurable effects on the recipient, and that an empathic connection between the healer and the recipient is a vital part of the process. Achterberg J, Cooke K, Richards T, Standish L, Kozak L, and Lake J. "Evidence for Correlations between Distant Intentionality and Brain Function in Recipients: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis." Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. 2005; 11(6):965-971. • A randomized, controlled study at UCSF School of Medicine/San Francisco General Hospital involved 393 patients who were admitted to the coronary care unit for heart attack or chest pain. Those receiving assigned prayer did better clinically on several counts, including less need for CPR, less need for potent medications, and a lower incidence of pulmonary edema and pneumonia. Byrd R. Positive therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer in 1988; 81(7): 826-9. • In a double-blind study in the coronary care unit at Mid-America Heart Institute, Kansas City, Kansas, and the University of Kansas School of Medicine, patients were randomized to receive remote, intercessory prayer (prayer group) or not (usual care group). Those receiving assigned prayer had a statistically significant, better clinical score than the control group. Harris W, Gowda M, Kolb JW, Strychacz CP, Vacek JL, Jones PG, Forker A, O'Keefe JH, McCallister BD. A randomized, controlled trial of the effects of remote, intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients admitted to the coronary care unit. Archives of Internal Medicine. 1999;159(19):2273-2278. • A randomized, controlled trial studied the effects of intercessory prayer in undergraduates in an upper-level psychology course. Eight participants were prayed for by one of the experimenters, using a nondirective method of prayer where no specific requests were made. Results showed significant reductions in anxiety for subjects who were prayed for, but not for those who were not prayed for. Tloczynshi J, Fritzsch S. Intercessory prayer in psychological well-being: using a multiple-baseline, across-subjects design. Psychological Reports. 2002;91(3 Pt 1): 731-41. • This triple-blind, controlled trial of off-site prayer involved women undergoing in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer in a fertility clinic in Seoul, Korea. The group receiving assigned prayer from people in the U.S., Canada, and Australia had twice the successful pregnancy rate as women in the control group, a highly significant result. Cha KY, MD, Wirth DP, Lobo R. Does prayer influence the success of in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer? Report of a masked, randomized Trial. J. Reproductive Medicine. September 2001; 46(9): 781-787.

RD: Dr. Dossey, you are an ambassador from the world of “scientific” medicine to the world of alternative healing, which isn’t what we might call “scientific.”

LD: Yes, I am sort of a roving provocateur in the field of complementary or alternative medicine, and have been for 30 years. But let me dispense with one view, which I think needs to be honored by people on both sides of the fence, whether they come from conventional or alternative medicine. It’s easy to drift into a double standard, when we talk about alternative medicine, and say that it’s pretty much unscientific and unproven, whereas conventional medicine is proven scientifically.
God knows, we need more science on both sides of this debate, but it’s a stretch to say there’s a huge scientific divide between these two camps. For example, the British Medical Journal, which is one of the best medical journals in the world, has a website on therapeutic efficacy with more than 2,000 therapies that are used in conventional medicine. Nearly 70 percent of these therapies are acknowledged by the British Medical Journal to be unproven or to actually cause harm to people. Only about 30 percent are known to be scientifically validated and to be safe.

RD: Do you think the practice of conventional medicine falls short in that regard?

LD: There’s no question about it. Surveys such as the one I have mentioned make that clear. I’m not suggesting that we shut down the practice of conventional medicine; we just need more technology, better technology that’s buttressed by scientific evidence. Right now, as these studies show, we simply don’t have it. This is what I mean when I say we erect a double standard when we demand rigorous scientific proof from alternative medicine while we let conventional medicine slip under the wire. I stand up for testing all therapies, on both sides of the fence, with extreme rigor.

RD: Is there a substantial body of evidence to support alternative medicine?

LD: There is a substantial body of evidence, but it also is lacking, in degree, because we tend to be too generous for alternative medicine as well. What I’m saying is, we need a single standard where we subject both conventional and alternative medicine to the same high standards. And those standards should include ruthless science and ruthless demand for efficacy of what we do. We ought to apply this to both sides of the fence, not just to one, as we often do.

RD: Much of your work is in the area of intercessory prayer, and it appears that there some evidence supporting it. Could you talk more about that?

LD: Currently we have 19 major, randomized, controlled clinical trials showing the power of intercessory prayer, 11 of which are statistically significant—meaning that you can’t explain away the results of these studies by saying it just happened according to chance. These studies are showing that something phenomenal is happening with how our consciousness, our minds, our intentions, wishes, wants and prayers, operate in the world.

This data is not going to go away. It’s come out of some of the most high-level institutions and medical schools in the country, but it is pretty much dismissed by people who simply don’t want to give it a hearing. I understand why. I’ve been in this field for about 30 years. It questions the tenets of modern science where the mind is concerned.

People who come out of modern medical training are convinced that consciousness pretty much equals the brain. We are taught that the brain operates within the skull and within the body of the individual person. And we “know” that it can’t make a differnce out there in the world. These studies force us to go beyond those limited ideas of what consciousness is and how it operates. And as a result, these studies are threatening. I think these studies are fantastically important, because they force us to enlarge our picture of what consciousness is.

The picture that’s emerging from these studies is what I call a non-local one. By that, I mean a picture of consciousness that says that it can operate outside the individual brain and body, and perhaps even outside the present moment. This leads us to what I call a non-local view of consciousness; that’s simply another word for infinite. We are at the threshold of an infinite picture of consciousness. I think this is just thrilling, because it has all sorts of implications, among which is the possible survival of bodily death.

These studies suggest that consciousness isn’t confined to the brain and body. Consciousness can do something that individual brains and bodies can’t do; it can operate at a distance outside the limits of space and time. When you begin to think in these terms, you can perhaps get a feel for why these ideas are so threatening and repellant to some people who are invested with the conventional, limited view of the mind.

RD: Our common view of ourselves, what self is, is rooted in our physical bodies and brains, and is constrained in space and time. So we take for granted, and our own science essentially supports, that the reality we experience moment to moment must therefore be true everywhere in the universe.

But here’s the conundrum I see: our ancient ancestors had a view of reality that differed greatly from ours and revolved around the earth. Their solutions for disease or crop failure or threatening weather didn’t work as well as modern humanity’s methods, such as building houses higher on the slope so they didn’t get washed away by floods, or preventing death by infection through the use of penicillin.

Modern science and technology, which are based largely on this time/space-anchored view, have produced amazing results. Are you seeing tangible, day-in and day-out, benefits from this non-local view of consciousness?

LD: Yes, to some extent. But first, let me clarify: I think the largest benefits of this new view, this non-local view of consciousness, are not whether or not you can use it to make yourself healthier or make a disease go away. The primary benefit of this non-local view of consciousness is that it gives us a way of transcending our limited view of who we are, as someone who is confined to the physical and who totally perishes with the death and annihilation of the body. Something seems to be beyond the body; I think this is the greatest implication of this new point of view.

Now if we can use this new view to make a disease go away or to live a few years longer, I think that’s all for the good. These prayer studies suggest we can do that. Prayer is correlated with resolution of physical disease, statistically speaking, so there is a tangible benefit to this non-local view of consciousness. I wouldn’t say this is a new tool in our black bag. It’s not new; it’s ancient.

So there are practical benefits to this, and we ought to honor and be grateful for those, but that’s just the beginning of things.

RD: Could you give me an example of some of the studies that suggest the non-local view of reality?

LD: One great study, which was just published in November 2005, was done by Dr. Jeanne Achterberg on the Big Island of Hawaii. Dr. Achterberg recruited 11 native healers from the island and asked them to select a subject to work with, someone with whom they were deeply empathic and had worked with in the past—in other words, someone with whom they shared a deep, emotional bonding.

The subjects were put in an FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner, and their brains were scanned while the native healer was sending prayer or healing to the subject. These healing intentions were randomly spaced, so there was no way the subjects could know when they were being sent. The FMRI brain scan showed that during the healing periods, when the healer was sending energy, prayer, love, compassion or whatever they called it, certain areas of the brain lit up in the subjects. The possibility that this could be explained according to random chance happenings was 1 in 10,000. Ten of the 11 subjects demonstrated these changes in their brains when the healers were sending their love, compassion, healing and so on.

This is a profoundly important demonstration of the power of prayer or intention, and of the possibility of a non-local consciousness. Interestingly, although this study was published in a peer review journal, I haven’t been able to find any press coverage of this study. This should inspire banner headlines because it so profoundly, beautifully and powerfully shows that our intentions, compassion and empathy go beyond the individual person and can affect the world out there, including other individuals.

RD: You must have looked carefully at the report; did you see any flaws in the study?

LD: I can’t find any. And this study does not stand alone; there are more than half a dozen similar experiments. One of the best summaries of this entire field is in a book by Dr. Dean Radin called Entangled Minds. Entanglement is a concept that’s come out of quantum physics. Dr. Radin is a superb scientist who thinks that the explanation of these phenomena, of being able to influence another’s healing through thought or prayer, is going to come out in quantum mechanics and quantum physics, and that this idea of entanglement is going to explain how these things happen.

RD: It sounds like this study in Hawaii had to do with the healer sending a thought that was received by the subject, which challenges our view of space. But what about a study that challenges our view of time?

LD: Here’s an amazing example. There was a study published a few years ago in the British Medical Journal by Dr. Leonard Leibovici, an immunologist at a medical school in Israel. He had a healer pray for about 2,000 patients who were hospitalized 4 to 10 years earlier for a serious medical problem called sepsis, which is an infection in the bloodstream.

Leibovici randomized these patients into groups that would receive prayer in current time or not receive it. He had the healer pray for the intervention group and not for the control group. And then he looked at the charts of the people in both groups and analyzed their clinical course. Lo and behold, he found that the group who were assigned prayer in present time had a superior clinical course when compared to the control group.

This has been called a retroactive prayer study. As far as I know, no one has come up with any methodological flaws in this study. A couple of years ago, I wrote a paper with a friend of mine, Dr. Brian Olshansky at the University of Iowa Medical School, which was published in the British Medical Journal ; the paper analyzed and commented on this study. And it profoundly suggests that human consciousness may be able to operate outside the present and influence events that we presume have already happened.

RD: How significant were the differences between the control group and the intervention group?

LD: They were highly statistically significant. The areas of difference were that the patients in the prayed-for group got out of the hospital faster than the unprayed-for group, which is really an important difference. And the level of temperature increase in the prayed-for group was not nearly as high in as the unprayed-for group, suggesting a significant improvement in clinical course while they were in the hospital. It just boggles the mind how this might be true.

RD: Well, there are two things that happened. One is the supposed random selection of the test subjects with the

purpose of subjecting them to this intercession, and the other was the praying itself; either one of those could have been responsible for the positive outcomes.

LD: This is one of the potential possible explanations that went into our paper in the British Medical Journal.

RD: Both of them presume this different view of time, though.

LD: That’s exactly right. Either way you go, you have a mind-boggling explanation on your hands. It could be that efforts in the present influence the randomization of the charts in the present. There are many studies showing that people can influence random events; some examples of this are in studies done at Princeton University by Dr. Robert Jahn’s group. Or it could be that the healer influenced the actual clinical outcomes of the patient.

I don’t know any way to sort that out, to distinguish between those two possibilities. But, as I say, either way you go, you come up with a mind-ripping hypothesis of what consciousness is capable of in the world, which goes far beyond conventional ideas of the limitations of consciousness.

RD: Do you know of other studies that attempt to replicate those findings, or perhaps other studies that produce the same mind-boggling results?

LD: There are, as I recall, 23 studies on retroactive influence that have been published in professional literature. These were reviewed by Dr. William Braud about three years ago in the journal Alternative Therapies. Dr. Braud is the Director of Research at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park, California. As I recall, two-thirds of these studies suggest retroactive influence through statistical significance.

The retroactive prayer study rests upon this impressive body of prior studies showing that this phenomena is perhaps more common than we think it is. There’s a significant body of evidence suggesting that consciousness may be able to operate outside of the present moment, not just the Leibovici study.

RD: When we’re looking at studies, Dr. Dossey, we’re often looking at a situation where, let’s say, out of 100 test subjects, 30 got better. That’s a pretty significant number. But when you have cancer and you pay a healer $300 to lay their hands on you, you want something way more significant than these percentages we’re discussing, don’t you think?

LD: Yes, people in those situations are probably looking for a 100 percent certainty. You want the cancer to go away; you want certainty. But you never have it. Whether we’re assessing faith healers, prayer, chemotherapy or radical surgery for cancer, the studies are always statistical. Statistics is the backbone of all modern medical research. The best that any therapist, whether conventional or alternative, can tell a patient is that there’s a such-and-such likelihood that this is going to work. There’s a such-and-such likelihood that it’s going to fail. This term “likelihood” means statistics.

RD: Where do you see this research, and the theories that arise from it, taking us in the medical world? Or beyond the medical world?

LD: I think we’re facing a future where both views will be honored, both the hard-core, physically-based technology and a view which honors the effects of consciousness. I think one day we will stop dichotomizing mind and body, and we’ll stop talking about the purely physical and the purely mental. I think the divisions are phony, and that it’s always a mistake to paint a therapy as totally physical or totally mental. The composite picture, which we are agonizing our way toward, will honor both.

Right now, we have difficulty thinking in terms of shades of gray. We dichotomize; we think in terms of black and white. Something is either physical or psychological, and there isn’t any interaction. That view cannot hold, because there is too much evidence that our thoughts, emotions, attitudes, feelings, intentions, prayers and so forth influence what we call the physical world. The boundaries will crumble sooner or later.

Right now, we’re too immature in our thinking to be able to see this. You know those ancient insects that are frozen in amber? Our models in conventional medicine are trapped like that. We don’t seem to be able to bust out of a frozen situation and go for the composite greater picture that honors a fusion of the mental and the physical into one domain. But we will mature, and that’s where we’re going to wind up. I’m confident, because these anomalous studies we’ve been talking about are just not going to go away. They are part of the language of science now, and they give us a glimpse of where, eventually, we are going to be headed.

RD: If outcomes of fatal illnesses can be altered in the past by groups of people praying for sufferers of the disease, it opens a floodgate of scenarios: why wouldn’t we devote a quarter of all of our waking time helping out those people, or something along those lines?

LD: I think the reason is a failure of imagination. We’re limited about what we can conceive, and so we don’t do that. My point is that what appear to be outrageous interventions currently will, with time, become commonplace. All through history, advances or inventions in medicine have been met with great skepticism. For example, when X-rays were first introduced, they were criticized as being a hoax by the leading medical and science experts of that time. When chemotherapy was first introduced, it was condemned as something so irrational it couldn’t possibly be effective.

Who knows where we’re headed. I simply agree with Williams James, the great father of American psychology, who said that it’s premature to foreclose our accounts on reality. They’re always changing. So I say remain flexible, be nimble, and prepare to go where the data leads us.

RD: Your own experience and training was as a medical doctor, and then you were influenced by Eastern thinking and Western metaphysics. Who were your greatest influences?

LD: In medical school, I bumped into the writings of Alan Watts, who, back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, was huge in introducing Buddhist concepts to the West. I grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist culture in Central Texas. When I went away to college, I threw all that overboard and became a self-respecting agnostic. Late in medical school, when I encountered Buddhist literature, I began to re-grow my spiritual roots.

At that time, there weren’t many teachers of Buddhism, so I developed my own eclectic practice. I started meditating and exploring Zen. Alan Watts was key in helping me re-grow my spiritual roots. I’m not a Buddhist; I don’t belong to any religious organization. But Buddhism had a sense of sanity and practicality that I found extraordinarily inspiring and refreshing, and still do.

RD: Many people with whom I speak have had mind-blowing experiences during meditation or dreams or spiritual practices that led them to discard their old views. Have you had such experiences?

LD: During my first year in medical practice, I had a prophetic dream—what’s called a precognitive dream—in which I saw the outcome of a clinical situation the night before it happened. This was a dream of such clinical detail and such accuracy and complexity that I can’t ascribe it to chance or dismiss it as “one of those things.” It profoundly shocked me; it was a vivid personal demonstration that consciousness is not confined to the present.

I thought this was really unusual until I began to poke around the literature in this field and found that precognitive dreams were the most common experience among Americans in the entire field of parapsychology. I was sort of proud of myself, to tell you the truth, after having this experience. I didn’t have a clue how frequently this happened to other people. This discovery, along with my own precognitive dream, it told me in a heartbeat that my ideas about the nature of consciousness that I had been taught in medical school, were woefully limited.

RD: Did you have more prophetic dreams?

LD: Yes, within a month, I had two more, and I haven’t had one since. I’ve often wondered why. Alan Watts said once when you get the message, you hang up the phone.

RD: Have you had any other mind-blowing experiences, such as during meditative states or moments of great clarity and self-awareness?

LD: Yes, I’ve had moments of sheer, glorious transcendence during meditative states, and what many people call epiphanies that have come unannounced when I’m doing nothing, just minding my own business. I’ve had many of those experiences during my life.

RD: I’ve also met many people who have been radically changed by near-death experiences, either their own or other people’s. Have you had any of these?

LD: I have. I served in Vietnam as a battalion surgeon, so I was out on the front lines with the troops encountering the enemy; I was lucky to get back alive. I volunteered for it. I was a bored young doctor, and I wanted some in-depth experiences, something raw and immediate. And I got a dose of it.

Why did I do it? I don’t know. I was a young man, unmarried, not really looking forward to starting a career in private-practice medicine. I wanted to penetrate to some deeper level of experience, and I got my wish. My experiences during the war gave me a sense of what Buddhists call impermanence, the thin line between life and death, the impermanence of one’s existence; that was real to me on a daily basis for nearly a year.

RD: Your volunteering for those risky duties and being a battalion surgeon would be characterized now as heroic. Do you think of it that way?

LD: Well, courage is what you call it later, if you’re lucky enough to survive. No, I don’t call it that. One does what one does. You talk to any combat soldier who is later called a “hero” or “courageous,” and, if he’s honest, he’ll tell you exactly the same thing: you simply don’t think about it at the time. You just act.

RD: If you hadn’t served in Vietnam do you think you’d be in a different place now?

LD: I don’t think so. I think I would have found other avenues of growth and maturation. I may be flattering myself, but I think that there are many paths up the mountain, and I think I would have found an optional alternate path other than that experience in Vietnam.

I’ve been on the edge of research and medicine all of my professional life. This doesn’t get you a lot of peer adulation; it’s not exactly the best way to advance your career in medicine. So I don’t know why I feel more comfortable on the edge than in the accepted, adulated middle ground; I simply love the new ideas and being on what I consider the cutting edge, which is usually the margin of medicine. Being on the margin means being marginalized and accumulating criticism, but I would not have done it any other way.

Dr. Dossey will be appearing as the keynote speaker at the Nexus Holistic Expo, on Saturday, February 11, at 7:30 p.m., at the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder. Find more info on page 5 or online at NexusHolisticExpo.com. Or call 303-442-6662.