Larry Dossey - Healing Beyond the Body: Medicine and the Infinite Reach of the Mind

Reading Dossey is our prescription for all those who want to keep their souls nourished in these meaning-ripe times.

Spirituality & Health

Simultaneously joyous, amusing, insightful, profound, and challenging.

Choice

If you believe that going fishing is good for your health and that love can be a cure for what ails you, then you see modern medicine in much the same way Dr. Larry Dossey does.

The Times-Picayune

Larry Dosseys words of wisdom have inspired and challenged me for years. Healing beyond the Body is a sumptuous buffet of Dr. Dosseys most charming, healing, and delectable insights. Theres something here for everyoneits chicken soup for the body and soul, served with insight, intellectual rigor, and great compassion.

Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of Womens Bodies, Womens Wisdom and The Wisdom of Menopause

Dr. Larry Dossey reveals the extraordinary range and depth of his pioneering and enchanting vision. He is this generations Lewis Thomas.

Dean Ornish, M.D., author of Dr. Dean Ornishs Program for Reversing Heart Disease and Love & Survival

The essays in Healing beyond the Body are wide-ranging and excitingfrom dreams to creativity to prayer and immortalitybut they all explore the nature of consciousness and its role in healing. Larry Dossey reminds us that ultimately healing is about self-discovery, self-discovery is about spirit, and spirit is about consciousness.

Ken Wilber, author of A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality

Larry Dossey is wise, great-hearted, and good-humored guide on our journey toward healing ourselves and our planet. Reading his graceful essays on humor and love, physicians and food, physics and faith, we are informed, delighted, and transformed.

James S. Gordon, M.D., author of Manifesto for a New Medicine

ABOUT THE BOOK

Does the mind produce consciousnessor transmit it? Can machines detect love? Why has job stress become a worldwide epidemic? Why do objects sometimes seem to have minds of their own? Could war be a biological condition? Dr. Larry Dossey, one of the most influential spokespersons for the role of consciousness and spirituality in medicine, tackles all these questions and more with clarity and wit. In this book, he explores the relationshipoften documented in extensive researchbetween science and unscientific topics such as prayer, love, laughter, war, creativity, dreams, and immortality.

LARRY DOSSEY, M.D., is a physician of internal medicine. He was a battalion surgeon in Vietnam, chief of staff at Medical City Dallas Hospital, and a member of Hillary Rodham Clintons Task Force on Health Care Reform. He has lectured all over the world, including at the Mayo Clinic, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and numerous other major universities and medical schools. His eight other books include Space, Time, and Medicine; Healing Words; and Prayer Is Good Medicine.

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2001 by Larry Dossey

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The Library of Congress catalogues the hardcover edition of this book as follows:

Dossey, Larry 1940

Healing beyond the body: medicine and the infinite reach of the mind/Larry Dossey.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2922-0

ISBN 1-57062-860-2 (cloth: acid-free paper)

ISBN 1-57062-923-4 (paperback)

1. Mind and bodyHealth aspects. 2. HealingPsychological aspects. 3. Medicine and psychology. I. Title.

R726.5 .D669 2001

DESIGNED BY DEDE CUMMINGS DESIGNS

For the physicians, nurses, and other health-care professionals who are reclaiming the title of healer, and for the researchers who are exploring how healing operates beyond the body.

The subtlety of nature is vastly superior to that of argument.

SIR FRANCIS BACON

CONTENTS

I LL NEVER FORGET A WOMAN who came to me trembling, in tears, and nearly speechless with rage. She had just returned from my hospitals intensive care unit, where her mother, my patient, was dying. Her mother was unconscious and on several life-support systems, and nothing was working. The daughter had just been chased from the bedside because visiting hours were over; further visitation, she was told, was against policy and would interfere.

Her mother died in the night, alone.

Being separated from her dying mother seemed to this woman to be the ultimate indignity. She was prepared to damn the whole of modern medicine, not only for its ineffectiveness, but for its callousness as well. She remained embittered toward a system that, as far as she was concerned, neither worked nor cared.

This experience captures so many of the reasons people currently object to modern health careas inhumane, remote, cold, uncaring, too mechanical and technical, too expensive, too heroic, and often too late. When medicine fails and patients and family members are overwhelmed with disappointment and grief, it does not comfort them to be reminded of medicines successes. For them, only the immediate moment is real.

When will medicine change? The question is not when or whether, but in what direction and to what degree. Medicine has always changed; historically it is one of the most dynamic forces in human culture, and today is no different.

Currently, medical science sizzles with new developments. The decoding of the human genome is essentially complete, which will lay bare the book of our DNA and make possible undreamed-of therapies. Gene manipulation and the transfer of DNA from one individual to another are in the wind, and researchers are predicting the elimination of many genetically based diseases. New surgical procedures are continually surfacing, as are new drugs. Advances in organ transplantation are proceeding apace. The list of new developments seems to grow day by day.

But for all this heady talk, when people actually encounter the system, disappointment often follows, as it did for the daughter of my dying patient. The main reason is not that people get sick or even that they die. The primary problem is the realization that something vital has been left out of modern medicinethe human mind and its role in healing. This missing element has left a gaping hole, which the most dazzling technical breakthroughs will never fill.

Havent we already come to terms with the mind in healing? Today, everyone knows that consciousness is a factor in health. An army of psychologists and psychiatrists stands ready to teach us how to mold our mind in healthier ways, and stress management has become a growth industry. Even so, we have not yet given the mind its due.

In the essays that follow, we will go beyond the ordinary ways of viewing the mind. We will examine how our thoughts and emotions affect not only our own bodies but the bodies of others, at a distance, outside their awareness.