"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. 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."

- Larry Dossey, M.D.
  from Reinventing Medicine

EW: As a traditionally trained western physician what got you interested in the spiritual aspects of healing?

LD: I have had an intuitive spiritual sense for as long as I can remember. It's innate; I can't account for it - it got me, I didn't get it. This is not connected to religion - I belong to none - rather, it is a sense of connection with what I call the Absolute: something infinitely grander, more majestic, and wiser than the individual self.

Second, I've been influenced by scientific evidence showing a connection between spiritual practices, such as prayer and meditation, and human health. For me to disregard this information would be scientifically unjustified, as well as ethically and morally wrong. I've engaged this information personally and professionally, and this has made big differences in my life.

EW: How would you describe your concept of "meaning therapy" and its connection to the health of an individual?

LD: "Meaning therapy" is a no-brainer. It involves doing therapy on our meanings. For example, what is the meaning of your job? Job dissatisfaction has been shown to be a major predictor of fatal heart attack, and this may account for why more heart attacks occur on Monday morning, around 9 a.m., than at any other time of the week. So we have to ask, What does my job mean? What does Monday morning, 9 a.m., represent or symbolize in my life? And not just my job, but also my relationships with others, my spiritual life, and so on. If these meanings are negative, we ought to do what we can to shift the meaning from negative to positive, with the expectation that this will have positive health effects and might even save our life. This is not always easy, of course; major life changes can be required. But meaning therapy is really a very simple idea: trying to bring positive meaning to every sphere of our life.

EW: What do you believe is the role of our soul in illness? Our consciousness in illness?

LD: For me, the soul is that aspect of consciousness that is infinite in space and time - immortal and eternal. It is beyond birth and death and illness. Consciousness is what we sometimes call mind, and it has several gradations - the unconscious, the preconscious, waking awareness, the superconscious, transpersonal awareness, and so on. Probably all diseases are influenced to some degree by consciousness. Studies show that even the expressions of the genes, which we ordinarily consider beyond the reach of the mind, can be dramatically affected by consciousness. For instance, a genetic skin disease, several cases of congenital ichthyosis or "fishskin disease," have been successfully treated with hypnosis. In a multiple personality syndrome, one personality can have a particular illness, and a different pattern may exist in another personality.

Fortunately, consciousness does not control everything in our body. Most of our bodily processes proceed automatically on their own - breathing, heartbeat, and so on. But on occasion the effects of consciousness can be dramatic, even a matter of life and death.

EW: Can prayer play a part in a patient's recovery? And what part, if any, do you see prayer playing in medicine today?

LD: Many studies in both humans and nonhumans show that prayer or "distant intentionality," as researchers sometimes call it, can result in physical changes at a distance, even when the recipient is unaware of the effort. In humans, diseases such as advanced AIDS, heart disease, and the frequency of side effects of cardiac procedures have responded to prayer in controlled clinical studies.

As a result, prayer is returning to hospitals and clinics around the country. In the past few decades, medical people have been embarrassed to pray: It wasn't scientific. That's changing rapidly. Currently, around 80 of the nation's 125 medical schools have formal courses or lectures dealing with the role of prayer and spirituality in healthcare. This is a landmark development and speaks volumes about the legitimacy of the data surrounding prayer and other spiritual practices in healthcare.

EW: Does the degree of ones spiritual development determine our ability to heal ourselves?

LD: There are around 1,600 studies and surveys showing that, in general, religious practice and spiritual devotion are correlated with greater longevity and better health. This holds for almost all diseases. Interestingly, the particular religion or spiritual path one follows seems generally not to matter where these effects are concerned. So spirituality is connected with living longer and getting sick less often. And, as I've said, these factors also help people recover if they become sick, as we see in the prayer studies that involve specific medical problems. But folks should realize that all this information is statistical. We're talking "on average." This means there is no guarantee that just because you pray or follow some spiritual path you won't get cancer, or if you pray you'll recover from your heart attack. All modern medical studies are statistical. They tell us what therapies are most likely to work, on average, most of the time.

Although I've emphasized the role of spirituality in better health, I don't believe that's the best reason to follow a spiritual path in one's life. The main reason is to connect with the Absolute - God, Goddess, Allah, Universe - however named. When we make spirituality and prayer just a tool in our black bag, we dishonor them.

EW: What can dreams tell us about our health?

LD: Dreams often forecast illness. This is true for intuition in general. In one study, 21% of parents whose babies died from SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) had an intuition or hunch that their baby was headed for trouble, compared to only 2% of parents of normal babies.

The psychiatric literature contains hundreds of dreams of people that forecast their illness. For example, in one dream a nurse appeared, holding a light to a woman's lower leg, as if to illuminate something. This recurred for a year, but the woman could not get the meaning. Finally she developed an area of osteomyelitis (bone infection), requiring surgery, where the nurse held the light in the recurring dream. In another example, a woman dreamed she was sinking into a cavity in the earth and could not breathe. Shortly thereafter she developed tuberculosis, associated with cavities in her lungs and shortness of breath.

 
One of my patients had a dream in which she saw "three little white spots" on her left ovary, which was confirmed by a sonogram (to the dismay and shock of the radiologist involved). Dreams can be misleading, of course; they're not always on target. They ought to be combined with other ways of knowing, including conventional medical methods.

EW: Do you believe that the world today is more susceptible to a health crisis like the plagues of the middle Ages?

LD: On every hand, medical researchers are warning of an impending crisis from infections we thought were under control. A huge worry is tuberculosis, which was called the "white death" in the Middle Ages.The tuberculosis bacterium has developed resistance to antibiotics to which it was susceptible during the 20th century. The same holds for malaria and many other infectious diseases.

Another looming problem is potential plagues from global warming. If the predictions that the world may warm from 3 to 10 degrees F. over the next century turn out to be true, we will be living in a warmer, wetter world. This will probably result in the spread of tropical diseases into temperate climates such as the United States - yellow fever, dengue, malaria, and so on. West Nile virus outbreaks have already spread to the eastern coast of the U.S. The biggest toll will be on Third World nations who can least afford to deal with these problems.

EW: We have spoken to other physicians that are concerned about the threat of new plagues to humanity, caused by "emerging" microbes and new viruses. Do you have an opinion about why and how these new viruses emerge?

LD: There are many reasons. One I've mentioned: the stupid, utterly undisciplined ways we use antibiotic drugs. If you wanted to engineer new plagues, you'd use antibiotics the way they are generally used today around the world - recklessly, in improper doses and durations. This is a guarantee for disaster, as we are discovering. Problem is, even if we cleaned up our act in the U.S., this would not solve the problem because the resistant organisms would invade us from other regions of the world. Microbes don't respect borders.

There is a particular scenario we ought to give serious thought to - the Gaia Hypothesis, proposed by James Lovelock, which asserts that our planet is an intelligent entity. If so, the earth would almost certainly realize that human beings are the biggest threat to its integrity - polluting the atmosphere and oceans, clearing tropical forests, causing desertification, decimating species, etc. Gaia, being intelligent, would therefore marshall defenses to reduce the threats we pose. This might involve depopulating us by infections that not only kill, but which kill people in their reproductive years before they reproduce. Sounds like AIDS, doesn't it? Is AIDS Gaia's way of solving a problem? Another defensive measure might be to create mutations in existing microbes -tuberculosis, malaria, staph, and so on - which is already happening. It's not smart to fool Mother Nature.

I think there is much to say for this sort of reasoning. It's as if the planet has an intelligent immune system which is doing the smart thing: getting rid of the problem. From Earth's point of view, HIV (and other microbes) is its antibiotic, and we are the pathogens. Our arrogance prevents us from taking seriously perspectives such as this. We don't realize how expendable, how utterly unnecessary, we are to this planet.

EW: Is it possible that this increase in viral infection is a reflection of a deeper malaise in our collective human ecology as we strive to endure the stressful pace of our lives, and drift further from our relationship to the earth and each other in our effort to keep up?

LD: The "deeper malaise" is related to the realization that we have misbehaved badly as planetary citizens. We have broken faith with the living world, our home. We have been on a global rampage, particularly since the Industrial Revolution, empowered by damaging religious doctrines such as "go forth and multiply" and "take dominion." Deep inside we know we've been living a lie and that the jig is up. Although you don't get this on the evening news, everywhere people are awakening to a new sense of responsibility toward the Earth and its creatures.

For instance, consider the shift in the U.S. and the Western world in the past 20 years toward complementary/alternative medicine (CAM). This is one of the most massive social movements at the beginning of the new millennium. Studies show that most people who use CAM do so not just because they believe it works better than conventional medicine, but because of spiritual reasons. To most, CAM represents a closer connection with "earth intelligence" than synthetic pharmaceuticals.

The question, of course, is whether this growing global awareness will take place fast enough to avert disaster. In my travels, I have had the chance to ask a lot of smart people about this question - for example, the late great physicist David Bohm. "Will we make it?" I inquired. He responded, "Yes. Barely."
I agree. So I'm an optimist, although…we're in for a rough ride.

EW: It seems that every month or so we have headline news reports about children killing each other. Other physicians have raised the issue that this kind of aberrant rage might be directly related to viral infections in young, developing brains, particularly in the 'rage' centers of the brain. We do, of course, have other influences like television, computer games, and difficult family situations, but do you have a perspective on the possibility that viral infections could be contributing to this very sad and troubling situation?

LD: We need to enlarge our concept of "virus." Viruses aren't merely bits of protein, RNA, or DNA operating independently inside our bodies. Studies show their effects can be influenced by our own thoughts, emotions, intentions, prayers, and so on. For example, well-controlled studies show that people can either increase or decrease the replication rate of microbes in test tubes in laboratories. This should lead us to ask, What are we telling all those viruses, bacteria, fungi that concern us? What messages are we sending? What power do we grant or deny them?

I'm not suggesting that we control 100% of the behavior of microbes inside our bodies, but our thoughts do matter, sometimes greatly. Consider, for example, the findings of Dr. George Solomon at UCLA in his work with long-term AIDS survivors. Some of his findings:

* AIDS patients who felt that getting the disease was just an unlucky break were generally healthier than those who feel it was a retribution for sin.

* Long-surviving people with AIDS did not act in either a defiant or passive mode when consulting with their physicians, but saw them as partners.

* They did not perceive AIDS as a death sentence, but felt they could influence the outcome.

* Many felt they had unfinished business, unfulfilled goals, or activities they were looking forward to in the future.

* They altered their lifestyles to accommodate HIV, and engaged in some kind of physical fitness or exercise program.

* Interestingly, several had already overcome some serious life-threatening illness or other serious life event.

* In general, they

(a)were able to say "no",
(b) were able to nurture themselves by withdrawing from stressful involvements if necessary,
(c) were able to communicate openly about their needs, and
(d) were actively involved with others with the disease.

(Source: Marc Barasch and Caryle Hirshberg, Remarkable Recovery (New York: Riverhead;1995: 201-202)

EW: If our thoughts affect the course of illness, do we “cause" the disease in the first place?

LD: Lots of so-called "authorities" claim that our thoughts override everything, including all known physical factors, and that thought is the ultime cause of everything that happens to us, including illness. This is one of the most narcissistic, inflated ideas going. It is misleading, damaging, and just plain wrong. It sets people up for what I call "New Age guilt" - the sense of shame, blame, and failure on getting sick.

In any given illness there are probably more factors than we can possibly identify - some mind-related, some physical in nature. Anyone who claims they can sort out these myriad causes in any particular illness should not be believed, in my opinion.

One particularly damaging suggestion is that people get sick because of spiritual shortcomings - that, if they'd done their spiritual homework properly, they would have remained healthy. This is bad psychology, bad physiology, bad science, and horrible theology. The plain fact is, people who are highly spiritually realized often get sick and die of horrible diseases. Examples abound: Krishnamurti (cancer of the pancreas), Ramana Maharshi (cancer), Suzuki Roshi (cancer of the liver or gall bladder), Bernadette of Lourdes (disseminated tuberculosis or bone cancer), Jesus Christ (acute trauma), the Buddha (food poisoning). It is silly to say that just because people are god-realized they won't get sick. Spirituality and health don't always track each other, as the lives of the great saints and mystics show us.

EW: What is your view on genetics research and the ultimate cloning of human beings? Do you think the mapping of the genome will have any effect on our approach to viral treatment?

LD: We ought to declare a moratorium on cloning. It is arrogant in the extreme to assume that we have the intelligence to tinker with the fine balance that nature has achieved over the past 4 million years. Prometheus stole fire from heaven and was punished severely for his hubris. So, too, may we be punished through "the law of unintended consequences."

The problem is that we have a severe imbalance between wisdom and intelligence. We have the technical skills to proceed with cloning, but not the wisdom. We need a dose of humility. We should admit that in many areas of conduct we are dumb.

The pretentious assurances of scientists that there will be no widespread adverse repercussions from genetic manipulation of plants, animals, and humans are basically lies. They are guessing. This is an issue of the gravest ethical and moral concern, and people should take to the streets if that is what is required to bring sanity to those involved in this egregious exercise of human stupidity.


EW: As executive editor of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, what trends have you seen emerge in the past ten years that relate to chronic illness?

LD: There is a widespread sense that conventional medicine has largely failed in dealing with chronic health problems, and people have resorted to their own methods. This has resulted in the explosive growth of complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) in the past two decades, which took conventional medicine by surprise.

Conventional medicine is failing us not only in chronic diseases but in the treatment of acute problems as well. Recent data show that around 225,000 people die each year in U.S. hospitals from errors and non-error side effects of drugs, making hospital care the third leading cause of death in the U.S. behind heart disease and cancer. [Source: Barbara Starfield, "Is U.S. healthcare really the best in the world?" Journal of the American Medical Association. 2000;284(4):483-485.] This is not medicine bashing, but a statement of fact. I say this with a heavy heart; as an internal medicine physician, I am saddened by this track record.

EW: You have written a groundbreaking book, "Re-Inventing Medicine." If you could make one change in our relationship to our health and medicine, what would it be?

LD: I'd make a bigger place for consciousness in medicine - and that's happening. I'd also ask everyone - both healthcare professionals and laypersons - to engage the increasing evidence that there is a nonlocal or infinite quality of consciousness. This means that some aspect of consciousness is outside of space and time, thus immortal and eternal.
This paves the way for what I call Eternity Medicine - the recognition that the most essential aspect of who we are is soul-like, incapable of death. Eternity Medicine involves honoring that part of ourselves that is immortal and eternal. If we did this, this would be an effective treatment for the disease that has caused more suffering than all the physical problems put together - the fear of death.

EW: If you could make one change in the world's health system, and had the power to implement it, what would you do?

LD: Three things:

(a) I'd feed people well, so that no one went to bed hungry.

(b) I'd elevate the social and economic status of women worldwide, so that they had the option of resisting their role as mere procreation machines.

(c) I'd unleash an educational campaign that emphasized the embeddedness of humans in nature, showing how we're inextricably linked to what happens to all living things, and that diversity - not some homogenized, global sameness - is to be treasured.

Then I'd sit back with a smile and see what happens.