Larry Dossey, MD

The most fundamental questions that arise during a client-therapist interchange are Where does healing come from? and How can we make it happen? If you wanted to have a major healing–what some might call a miracle–how would you go about it?

The Therapy Spectrum

People have been trying to heal other people for at least as long as recorded history. When one person gets better on account of what another person does, how are we to understand that? I propose that all forms of healing fit into a spectrum from "rational" healing to "paradoxical" healing.

In rational forms of healing, what matters is what you do. In paradoxical healing, by contrast, it is not what you do but how you are–your being–that is everything. You can put any kind of therapy at some point in a spectrum running all the way from rational to paradoxical healing. At one end, you’ll see healing practices that make sense within today’s dominant paradigm. They’re reasonable, they’re rational–including the use of medication, radiation therapy, and surgery. Then, as you move toward the paradoxical end, things begin to seem more unusual.

How about biofeedback? Many readers of this...have at some time, I suppose, used a biofeedback apparatus, and have some familiarity with how it works. If you pay attention, you find that the best way to ensure failure is to try your darndest.

After a while, usually after five or ten minutes of impotent effort, something clicks. You realize that you’ve got to let go, without tuning out altogether. This dynamic is called "passive volition", and it really turns the modern medical agenda on its head. It is a paradox. Yet the fact of the phenomenon is there for anyone to experience personally.

G. K. Chesterton caught the essence of paradox when he defined it as "truth standing upside down to attract attention".

The Paradox of Prayer

One of the most paradoxical phenomena I’ve come across as a doctor is prayer. We have to pay attention to prayer as a paradoxical form of healing because the data are there. I regard the scientific evidence for the power of prayer as perhaps the best kept secret in modern medical science. Both the phenomenon and supporting data are virtually unknown by physicians.

There have been two major reviews of spiritual prayer or distant healing in the last ten years. One was by parapsychological researcher and statistician Jerry Solfvin(1). The most recent was done by a psychiatrist, Daniel Benor(2). According to a 1990 report Benor found 150 studies published in English dealing with this area. I want to emphasize that scientific data confirm a correlation between prayer and healing.

A good, scientifically respectable account of the healing power of prayer–one of the best I’ve come across in the past decade–is the work by a quiet group called Spindrift(3), in Salem, Oregon. They took a very straightforward approach. They tested prayer on simple biological systems, such as germinating seeds, getting their data by praying for the treatment group and not for the control group, and then measuring the respective germination rates of the seeds. Their experimental results were unequivocal: Prayer does work...

Spiritual Understanding and Health

An old myth about rainmakers tells us that when the shaman gets himself right then the rain falls. This view has a correlate in New Age thinking: "If I straighten myself out, the disease will go away. And if I really straighten myself out–spiritually and psychologically–the disease will never occur in the first place." Well, this is non-paradoxical, linear, causal thinking. Reality may not be structured to respond so faithfully to this worldview.

There are people who break every commonsense rule of health and never get sick...Flip that over, though, and what you get are the unhealthy saints and mystics. These are the God-realized Olympic-class spiritual achievers, leading irreproachable spiritual lives. They do everything right spiritually, yet frequently their health histories are miserable.

It may outrage our sense of cosmic justice, but spiritual achievement and physical health do not always go hand-in-hand. Sometimes the wisdom of the world works the other way, and the saints and sages suffer more than the wicked... And it is important to recognize this because otherwise it becomes all too easy to fall prey to the trap of self-blame when illness strikes.

Facing Into the Mystery

H. L. Mencken...said "Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops."

References

1. Jerry Solfvin, "Mental Healing", Advances in Parapsychological Research, Vol. 4, edited by Stanley Krippner (McFarland and Company, 1984), pp. 55-56.

2. Daniel J. Benor, "Survey of Spiritual Healing Research", Complementary Medical Research, 4 (3), September 1990; also Healing Research (Helix Verlag GmbH [Windeckstr. 82, D-81375 Munich, Germany], 1993).

3. The Spindrift data can be found in The Spindrift Papers and Robert Owen, Qualitative Research: The Early Years. Both obtainable through Spindrift, Inc., 100 W. Main St., #408, Lansdale, PA 19446.