The elderly man was diagnosed with cancer in both lungs. He refused all recommendations for therapy.
“Quite wisely,” said his young physician at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.
The man was sent home.
“To die,” said Dr. Larry Dossey, the doctor who had the peach fuzz and new diploma back then.
One year later, a colleague called Dossey and told him to come see the patient, who was in the hospital with the flu.
“I couldn’t believe he was still alive,” Dossey said. “I went straight to the radiology department.”
The man’s chest X-ray was normal for his age. The radiologist’s report said that “in the intervening 12 months there has been a remarkable response to therapy.”
Especially remarkable because there had been no prescribed treatment.
“The only therapy this man seemed to have was administered by a group of people from his church congregation,” Dossey said. “They would circle his hospital bed and pray for him.”
That was about 25 years ago. Dossey forgot about it as he pursued what turned into a formidable career in internal medicine, including a position as chief of staff at Medical City Dallas Hospital.
“Most internists accumulate a laundry list of such strange cases,” Dossey said during a recent visit to Chicago. “They bracket them and set them aside. Such cases are considered a `natural progression’ of disease, and we figure science will eventually explain them.”
But in 1988, Dossey discovered a research study that changed his perspective-and his life’s work.
Dr. Randolph Byrd, a cardiologist at San Francisco General Hospital, had conducted a 1986 study on the therapeutic value of prayer that was designed to stand up to scientific analysis. Over a 10-month period, a computer randomly assigned 393 patients in the hospital’s coronary-care unit either to a group that was prayed for (192 patients) or to a group not remembered in prayer (201 patients).
None of the doctors, nurses or patients knew who was designated to which group. Byrd, a practicing Christian, recruited various religious groups to pray for the assigned patients. Those praying were provided just the first names of patients, plus a brief description of their diagnosis and condition. There were no specific instructions on how to pray.
All the patients received standard medical care for their specific problems.
Study and scrutiny
The results were impressive, and statistically significant: The prayed-for patients were found five times less likely to require antibiotics and three times less likely to suffer lung complications. Also, none of the prayed-for group required endotracheal intubation (in which an artificial airway is inserted in the throat and attached to a mechanical ventilator), while 12 members of the control group needed the intervention.
Byrd’s study also showed that fewer people in the prayed-for group died, but the numbers were not statistically significant.
Dr. William Nolen, a surgeon from Litchfield, Minn., and author of a book debunking faith healing, was impressed: “It sounds like this study will stand up to the scrutiny,” he said at the time.
There was plenty of scrutinizing, as skeptics called out Byrd for not having genuine control groups. There was no way to stop family and friends who might be praying for individual patients, including the not-remembered group, nor to keep patients from praying for themselves. Also, there were no safeguards to monitor whether volunteers were truly praying for assigned patients.
Even so, the positive results associated with the prayed-for group fascinated Dossey. He said he was “astonished” to see prayer examined in an objective setting. He appreciated the difficulty of studying prayer-not as manageable, say, as ensuring who takes what pills-and admired the effort to bring prayer into the laboratory.
“I went to the literature to see if there was anything to support it,” he said. “There were more than 130 studies, if you define prayer very broadly.” He said a liberal definition of prayer rules out anyone’s being able to make correlations between specific religious affiliation and research outcomes.
“You cannot use these experiments to defend a particular way of praying,” he said. “There is no one formula that shakes out of these studies.”
Dossey uncovered a number of studies that show a simple “Thy will be done” approach was more powerful than when specific results were held in mind. In other experiments, a simple attitude of prayerfulness (“an all-pervading sense of holiness and a feeling of empathy, caring and compassion for the person or entity in need”) seemed to set the stage for healing.
Praying for fungus
The prayer research, which Dossey says includes 56 studies with a probability of incorrect findings at less than 1 in 100, is the foundation for Dossey’s newest book, “Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine” (HarperSanFrancisco).
It is his fifth book on spirituality and medicine, and the first to employ a full barrage of scientific material, rather than anecdotes from his medical practice mixed with his spiritual reawakening as a doctor. He makes a case for people’s incorporating prayer into their personal health program, whether they are sick or simply interested in preventing illness.
“There are studies showing the effect of prayer not only on human subjects but also on animals, plants and lower organisms,” said Dossey, who left his medical practice in 1988 to become a full-time lecturer and author based in Santa Fe.
For example, a French study reported that 10 people concentrated on fungus cultures in a lab setting, praying to inhibit their growth. Out of 194 culture dishes, 151 showed retarded growth. At St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, 60 subjects were able to first impede and then stimulate bacterial cultures.
“The evidence is so impressive that I regard it as one of the best-kept secrets in medical science,” Dossey said. “Why is this information relatively unknown? Medical journals have generally refused, until recently, to publish studies on healing.”
Dr. George D. Lundberg, editor of the popular Journal of the American Medical Association, said: “Our journal welcomes serious scientific studies using any means of intervention, including alternative therapies, psychotherapy, hypnosis, the placebo effect and prayer. We have received papers in this field (prayer), but I do not recall any paper making it past peer review. Of course, we reject 90 percent of what is submitted to us.”
But Lundberg was reluctant to discount the possibilities of prayer, at least as applied to an individual’s religious beliefs.
“I am sure many physicians highly value the healing potential of a patient’s faith,” he said, “while other doctors-due to their personal beliefs-put less value on spirituality.”
`A science junkie’
Dossey said he thinks American medical schools drum the spiritual tendencies out of most students-at least in their jobs-and make no place for it in the process of healing.
“When it comes to health and illness,” he said, “the perspective is all problems reside at the level of atoms and molecules. There is no place for the activity of prayer. It becomes a silly concept.
“This view is shared uniformly. It begins with the professors and filters down. Medicine is one of the most spiritually malnourished professions in this culture.”
Dossey admits to falling in line as a medical student at the University of Texas at Austin, despite growing up as a devout member of the “fundamentalist Southern Baptist conservative religious atmosphere” in central Texas.
“Like everyone else at medical school, I fell in love with science,” he said. “I loved its precision, its predictability, the order, the power of cause and effect.
“I turned into an agnostic; I was a science junkie.”
Dossey professes a continuing addiction to scientific proof, and said that’s why medical schools regularly invite him to speak on prayer and medicine-albeit to the usual lukewarm public reception.
“After a talk, the response is very reserved,” he said. “Doctors do not stand up and cheer; they want to be seen as hard-nosed scientific types.”
Then the private correspondence begins.
“Doctors write me letters,” Dossey said. “I have a file drawer full of them. Their words are practically carbon copies of each other: `I don’t object to the data and basically I line up with you on it.’
“Some physicians even say they are convinced prayer works, but then add: `What you need to understand is if I said this publicly like you, I would never get another research grant or promotion. Conducting studies on prayer and healing is not a way to advance my career.’ “
Dossey is hoping the activities of the Panel of Mind/Body Interventions, of which he is co-chairman, will prompt more research through increased scientific respectability and financial grants. The panel, appointed by the federal government’s Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., will soon publish a report as part of a comprehensive effort to examine alternative medical practices in the U.S. to find out what seems to work and what merits further study, and to identify possible grant projects. (One federally funded study at the University of New Mexico is examining the benefit of prayer in treating alcoholism.)
Surprise opposition
In the interim, Dossey expects skepticism from the medical community. In fact, he welcomes it-provided doctors at least consider the research literature on prayer and health.
“Science is a hardball game,” he said, “but we are not allowed to skim off the top. Science is supposed to be an evenhanded examinaton of all the data. This data should be considered.”
But Dossey’s latest book and subsequent lectures have elicited opposition from a surprising source: religious organizations.
“Some conservative Christian groups are willing to go to extreme lengths to defend their special ways of praying,” Dossey said. “They are willing to toss out all of this data, to call it heresy and blasphemy, in order to defend their own unique, special ways of praying.
“I thought people would stand up and cheer when someone presented empirical evidence that prayer worked,” he said. But “some religious groups are bent out of shape because you can put agnostics in the laboratory and show the empirical effect of their prayers-as long as they have empathic, compassionate and loving concerns about the distant person in need.”
Dossey doesn’t advocate prayer as a stand-alone treatment, whether for an illness or as a preventive measure. “I’m not saying to skip the surgery or medical test,” he said, “just that prayer is an additional therapy you can use.”
Of course, if it seems our prayers aren’t always answered, it follows that prayer therapy won’t always work.
“I have no idea why some people get sick and die and prayer doesn’t work,” Dossey said. “But this is not a problem unique to prayer. There are no medical therapies that work 100 percent of the time. Penicillin is the common remedy for strep throat, but statistics show it doesn’t work 30 percent of the time.”
Another part of the mystery involving prayer is that no study shows how it works when it works.
“This is not damaging to prayer’s efficacy,” Dossey said. “The explanation in medicine often comes some years later.”
“We celebrate the mystery of prayer,” said Rev. John J. Wall, a Roman Catholic priest and pastor of Old St. Patrick’s Church in downtown Chicago. “The believer’s perspective is we are one in the mystery of God. There is a belief in the power beyond self and yet somehow within self.”
Dossey would like such faith to be part of a new era in medicine. He writes that Americans are most accustomed to Era I, in which physicalistic or scientific principles have dominated the medical field since the 1860s. He says Era II, a period of examining mind-body connections, has been operating since the 1950s. Era III would be “non-local science and medicine” that incorporates spirituality into the already prevalent physical, emotional and mental modes.
Dossey declares no denominational affiliation and said he would always pray for “universal wisdom and truth” rather than specific outcomes for patients or loved ones.
“I am not selling prayer,” he said. “I simply advocate putting the issue on the table and making it part of medical dialogue. That’s where I draw the line.”
