Larry Dossey - Prayer Is Good Medicine: How to Reap the Healing Benefits of Prayer

To my colleagues in health care
who have had the courage to carry prayer
into the hospital, clinic, and laboratory.

Prayer is back.

After sitting on the sidelines for most of this century, prayer is moving toward center stage in modern medicine. Doctors are taking prayer not just into their offices, clinics, and hospitals, but into experimental laboratories as well. Medical journals are more willing than ever to publish studies on the healing effects of prayer and faith. Cover stories on prayer have appeared in several national news magazines, and talks shows buzz with accounts of healing and prayer. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal recently devoted a major article in its Marketplace section to the scientific studies of prayer that are currently in progress.

Most of you would probably say, Its about time. Recent surveys show that 75 percent of patients believe their physicians should address spiritual issues as part of medical care, and 50 percent want their doctor to pray not just for them but with them. We doctors appear to be listening. You may be surprised to know that the majority of us actually pray for our patients. In December 1995 a conference entitled Spirituality and Healing in Medicine was held at Harvard Medical School in Boston, one of our best medical institutions. As of this writing, about one-third of the medical schools in the United States have developed courses in alternative/complementary medicine, many of which emphasize spiritual issues in health care, including prayer. Five medical schools have developed programs explicitly dedicated to exploring the relationship between faith and health.

Are we falling into fantasy? Hardly. Statistically, God is good for you, says David B. Larson, M.D., of the National Institute for Healthcare Research in Rockville, Maryland, which studies the relationship between spirituality and health. Larson, a former senior researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health, says, I was told by my [medical school] professors that religion is harmful. Then I looked at the research, and religion is actually highly beneficial. If you go to church or pray regularly, its very beneficial in terms of preventing illness, mental and physical, and you cope with illness much more effectively. If you look at the research, in area after area, its 80 percent beneficial. I was shocked.

So was I. I stumbled blindly into the research on prayer during the 1980s, when someone sent me a scientific paper in which prayer was tested in a modern hospital in a large group of heart patients. It had never occurred to me that anyone would actually test prayer like a new medicationpraying for half the patients and not for the other half, who were the controls, and measuring the results. This study strongly suggested a therapeutic effect of distant, intercessory prayer.

After I recovered from my surprise, I asked myself, If prayer works, shouldnt I be praying for my patients? I was skeptical of prayer at the time, and a single study was not convincing. Needing further proof, I embarked on my own research and discovered, to my further amazement, that there are more than 130 scientific studies in the general area of healing, many of which employ prayer. Over half of these experiments strongly indicate that prayer works. I soon came to regard this evidence as one of the best-kept secrets in modern medicine, and I began actively to pray for my patients.

My explorations of prayer and healing resulted in the 1993 publication of my book Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine . To my great pleasure, the strong reception to the book afforded me the opportunity to discuss prayer with a variety of audiencesmedical schools and hospitals, physician and nurse organizations, lay groups and churches, the National Institutes of Health, a Presidential Task Force on Health Care Reform, a section of the British Parliament, and even the Pentagon.

Certain questions surfaced again and again in these discussions. I know they are on your mind, too, because you sent me hundreds of letters describing your experiences and beliefs about prayer. I discovered that most of you are interested in four general areasthe scientific evidence for prayer, the controversies associated with the prayer experiments, what prayer is, and how to pray. This book is organized around these four categories. The various sections stand on their own and can be read in any order. Be your own guide.

I have written this book as a heart-to-heart talk, not as an academic or scholarly treatise. If you want to look deeper at the scientific issues surrounding prayer, you may consult Healing Words , where you can find descriptions and citations of the experiments themselves.

As you read this book, I hope you will resist the temptation to take an either-or stance toward prayer and modern medicine. As a physician, I have employed medications and surgical procedures because I know they work. But prayer works, too. The way I see it, we do not have to make absolute choices between prayer and high-tech medicine. If you have appendicitis, I believe you should have an appendectomy, because it is the most effective treatment humankind has ever devised for this particular problem. But why not employ prayer in addition to surgery? Prayerlike thoughts, offered from a distance, have been demonstrated to increase the healing rate of surgical wounds, and religious faith is associated with faster recovery from surgery. We ought to follow a common sense approach when were sick: Use what works. In most medical situations there will be a place for both prayer and modern medicine.