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Medicine And Books

Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine

BMJ 1995; 311 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.311.7013.1174 (Published 28 October 1995) Cite this as: BMJ 1995;311:1174
  1. John Roberts

    Throughout history, healing and religion have been inseparable. Only in the past 400 years, especially in the West, have the two disjoined enough for George Eliot to write in Middlemarch, “It is seldom a medical man has true religious views--there is too much pride of intellect.”

    Larry Dossey, a doctor in New Mexico, would rebut Eliot. Prayer, he says, is--and should be--integral to healing and to the practice of medicine. Before seeing patients each day, he takes time in his office to pray--or meditate, since he believes the two are the same. (He also repeatedly says that his prayers are his own and he would not reveal his beliefs to his patients.)

    “Never once did I pray for specific outcomes-- for cancers to go away, for heart attacks to be healed, for diabetes to vanish. ‘May the best possible outcome prevail' was the strategy I preferred.”

    Dossey invokes both Western and Eastern religion in his survey of prayer's role in healing, and his book actually goes far beyond prayer. For example, he reminds us that health cannot be comprehended unless there is disease and death. And he entertains us by pointing out how great holy people have died of the same common diseases that we commoners suffer. The Buddha, for example, probably died of food poisoning--not a particularly holy way to go.

    But what is prayer? Dossey doesn't venture a specific definition, saying instead that it is whatever people do to accept without being passive, to be grateful without giving up. “It is more willing to stand in the mystery, to tolerate ambiguity and the unknown. It honours the rightness of whatever happens, even cancer.”

    Healing Words is one of a growing number of books written by doctors who are returning to religion (or spirituality) as part of the healing process. Christiane Northrup's Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, Bernard Siegal's Love, Medicine and Miracles, Andrew Weil's Spontaneous Healing, and Deepak Chopra's Perfect Health are among the most popular. All of these books preach much the same message as Dossey's--that healing is more than curing. And Dossey believes that every doctor has seen health even among the terminally ill.

    The first third of Healing Words reminds us of the divinity that underlies every good approach to healing. But the remainder of the book takes two unfortunate turns. Firstly, Dossey goes off into convoluted new-age jargon, talking of the power of “non-local events” in healing. He seems to contradict his initial thesis that some greater power holds the truth to what is right and that it is our job to hope that “Thy will be done.”

    Secondly, he spends much of the second half of the book justifying prayer by doing an informal review of the scientific literature, from cell and animal studies all the way to specific clinical outcomes. In other words, he tries to use the scientific method to prove what he says initially cannot be proved.

    Still, Healing Words is worth the read, just to review a rational argument for looking inward as part of how humans can heal. Hope does heal. Prayer and meditation remind us that disease and death, however unpleasant, are part of our destiny.

    And prayer and religion are never far from medicine, as even the pages of this journal have shown. In 1953, Sir Robert Hutchinson wrote in the BMJ: “From inability to leave well alone; from too much zeal for the new and contempt for what is old; from putting knowledge before wisdom, science before art, and cleverness before common sense; from treating patients as cases; and from making cure of the disease more grievous than the endurance of the same, Good Lord, deliver us.”--JOHN ROBERTS, North American editor, BMJ

    Figure1

    An Australian 10 cents coin impacted in the oesophagus, from A Colour Atlas of Otorhinolaryngology by Bruce Benjamin, Brian Bingham, Michael Hawke, and Heinz Stammberger (Dunitz, ISBN 1 85317 122 0), which is particularly distinguished for its fine collection of endoscopic views of ears, nose, and throat.