TOP STORY: RELIGION AND CULTURE: Does prayer help the medicine go down?

c. 1996 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _”I’m an honest-to-God doctor,”said Larry Dossey, grinning at his pun. Dossey _ a physician, best-selling author and executive editor of the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine _ is a proponent of synthesizing spirituality and science.”Faith empowers science,”he said during a recent visit to Washington.”If you join reason […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _”I’m an honest-to-God doctor,”said Larry Dossey, grinning at his pun.

Dossey _ a physician, best-selling author and executive editor of the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine _ is a proponent of synthesizing spirituality and science.”Faith empowers science,”he said during a recent visit to Washington.”If you join reason with faith, then you have something more powerful than either.” Dossey’s new book,”Prayer is Good Medicine: How to Reap the Healing Benefits of Prayer”(HarperSanFrancisco), is the most recent attempt by the Santa Fe, N.M., internist to popularize the growing body of research on the health benefits of prayer.


The book appears as the medical profession wrestles with the increased attention being paid to the subject. Even Time magazine, that bastion of establishment thinking, featured faith and healing as a recent cover story.

Skeptics maintain that prayer in a medical context amounts to little more than a placebo. They also fear that prayer _ when unduly pushed by a physician _ can be an invasion of privacy. Moreover, they argue, faith eludes scientific understanding and so its worth in medicine cannot be quantified.

Still, there appears to be a rising number of medical practitioners and patients who believe that authentic prayer grounded in genuine faith can help people deal with physical disease and injury.

A Time/CNN survey in June said that 73 percent of those polled believe that praying for someone can help cure their illness. Sixty-four percent said that doctors should join their patients in prayer if requested to do so.

Those findings are no surprise to Dossey.

In his new book, Dossey cites more than 150 studies that he says support the healing power of prayer. Among them are studies that conclude that even”distant, intercessory”prayers said unbeknownst to the intended beneficiary, can affect the healing process.”The plain facts are that people who (pray) in their lives live longer and feel better,”he said.

However, Dossey makes clear that he does not believe people should abandon traditional medicine and rely only on prayer. In this way, he differs from Christian Scientists and others who reject conventional medicine believing worship and prayer alone cure disease.

Dossey’s writing often takes him into what for many others are uncharted waters. Still, he remains certain of the medical value of prayer and other spiritual acts.”Prayer is back. After sitting on the sidelines for most of this century, prayer is moving toward center stage in modern medicine,”he said in his book.”We are so young in this field of spirituality in science,”added Dr. David Larson, president of the private National Institute for Healthcare Research (NIHR) in Rockville, Md.”How do we give riverbanks to this river of research?”said Larson, a research psychiatrist.

The American Medical Association (AMA) has yet to pass judgment on the research relating to the health benefits of prayer.


At this point, the only AMA policy on prayer and healing is”to publicize the position that prayer as therapy should not delay access to traditional medical care”and that prayer therapy should not be reimbursed by insurance companies.

However, the federal government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Alternative Medicine, which has operated since 1992 under congressional mandate, has funded an exploratory project involving the effect of prayer on alcoholics.

Although that study was inconclusive, NIH spokeswoman Anita Green said”spirituality has its place with mind-body intervention and it plays a role in overall health and well-being.” In addition, five medical schools _ including Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Penn State University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York _ now offer courses in spirituality and healing.

Dr. Dale Matthews, an internist and associate professor of medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, prays regularly with his patients.”If a patient is very religious, I speak their language,”Matthews said,”Praying with patients is extremely powerful.” Bruce Frazer and his wife Carol are patients of Dr. Matthews. Bruce, a marketing consultant and writer, said that prayer helped him and his wife survive serious illnesses.”I would hate for either of us to go through what we’ve been through without being able to sense the presence and love of God,”said Bruce, who suffers from Bell’s palsy, a facial muscle paralysis whose symptoms mimic the symptoms of a stroke. Carol suffers from multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system.

Although a best-selling author and a physician who was trained in traditional medicine at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Dossey is often associated with New Age, alternative thinking.

But even doctors from more traditional religious backgrounds now incorporate prayer into their medical practice. Dr. Scott Keller, a family physician in Lilburn, Ga., is one such example.


Keller said literature from the Bristol, Tenn.-based Christian Medical and Dental Society (CMDS) _ which defines itself as an”evangelical Christian witness”_ helps him to sense when patients want to incorporate spirituality into their treatment.”I’m learning to be more sensitive to where patients are spiritually,”Keller said.”It’s like making people take medication; I’m not going to force them if they don’t want to take it.” Rabbi Levi Meier, the Jewish chaplain at Cedar Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said:”The education of physicians has to involve the anatomy of the soul, not just the anatomy of the body.” But Dossey stressed that spirituality does not have to be connected to a particular religion to be effective. In his book, he writes,”It is possible to pray without being religious, and one can be religious and not pray.” Nor is there anything complicated about prayer for Dossey.”A doctor should just simply pray,”Dossey said.”Prayer is so allied with love, I’m just extending compassion. I’ve never met anyone who objected to a little love.”

MJP END LEBOWITZ

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