Transcript Document

Why Distant Healing?
Why Now?
Larry Dossey, MD
UTMB
Galveston, TX
March 12, 2004
Premise:
Spiritual factors are important in
both the prevention and treatment of probably all major
illnesses.
The re-spiritualization of medicine:
Recent indicators
• 1993: Only 3/125 medical schools in U. S. A. featured
courses in spirituality and health; in 2004, 90 have such.
• 1997: Joint Commission on Accreditation
• 1998: Association of American Medical Colleges
• 1998: Astin survey: “transformational experience”
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Astin JA. “Why Patients Use Alternative Medicine — Results of a National Survey.”
Journal of the American Medical Association. 1998; 279(19): 1548-1553.
Spirituality: the sense of
connectedness with an absolute,
imminent, or transcendent power,
however named.
Religion:
ritualized spirituality; a
codified system of belief, worship,
and conduct that often includes a
sense of the spiritual.
Spirituality & medicine:
What do doctors believe?
Survey of 296 family physicians:
• 99% are convinced that spiritual beliefs can
heal
• 75% believe that prayers of others can help
a patient recover
• 38% believe that faith healers can make
people well
______________________________________________________
Survey by Yankelovich Partners; American Academy of Family Physicians
Annual meeting, October 1996; Parade Magazine, Dec. 1, 1996.
What do physicians do
about spirituality and health?
A random national survey of 1,000 adults
found that only 10 percent said that a
doctor had ever talked to them about their
spiritual beliefs as a factor in physical
health.
__________________________
McNichol T. The new faith in medicine.
USA Weekend. April 5-6, 1996:4-5.
Spirituality & medicine:
What do patients want?
Survey of hospitalized patients :
• 75% said their physicians should be
concerned about their spiritual beliefs.
• 50% said their physician should pray not
only for them, but with them.
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King DE, Bushwick B. “Beliefs and attitudes of hospital inpatients
about faith healing and prayer.” Journal of Family Practice. 1994;
39(4): 349-352.
Spirituality & health:
2 major areas of research
•
religious practices, health, &
longevity (approx. 1,200
published studies)
(Koenig HG, McCullough ME, Larson DB. Handbook of Religion
and Health. New York: Oxford University Press; 2001.)
•
prayer & distant healing (approx. 150
published studies)
Religion & health:
Those who follow a religious practice
— it does not appear to matter which —
live significantly longer (7 to 13 yrs.) and
have a lower incidence of major diseases.
———————————————————————————
McCullough ME, Hoyt WT, Larson DB, Koenig H, Thoresen C.
Religious involvement and mortality: A meta-analytic review.
Health Psychology. 2000;19(3):211-222.
Religion & health:
Naturalistic mechanisms
•
•
•
•
•
better health habits
less smoking and drinking
dietary precautions; vegetarianism
social support and networks
sense of meaning and purpose
_____________________________________
Levin JS, Schiller PL. Is there a religious
factor in health? J. Religion and Health.
1987;26:9-36.
ERA I MEDICINE
(Mechanical)
ERA II MEDICINE
(Mind-Body)
ERA III MEDICINE
( Nonlocal )
Prayer:
What is it?
Prayer
(cultural definition)
Prayer is talking aloud or silently
to a white, short-tempered,
male, cosmic parent figure,who
prefers to be addressed in English.
Prayer
(ecumenical definition)
…communication with
the Absolute.
“[The brain’s] workings — what
we sometimes call mind — are a
consequence of its anatomy and
physiology, and nothing more.”
— CARL SAGAN
____________________________________________________
The Dragons of Eden. New York: Simon & Schuster; 1977:7.
“...a person’s mental activities
are entirely due to the behavior
of nerve cells, glial cells, and the
atoms, ions, and molecules
that make up and influence
them.”
— FRANCIS CRICK
______________________________
The Astonishing Hypothesis. New York: Simon
& Schuster; 1994.
What have
experts said?
“This ‘telephone’ has too many
shortcomings to be seriously
considered as a means of
communication. The device
is inherently of no value to us.”
— Western Union
internal memo, 1876
“Heavier-than-air
flying machines
are impossible.”
— Lord Kelvin
President, Royal Society, 1895
“Who the hell wants
to hear actors talk?”
— Harry M. Warner,
Warner Brothers, 1927
“This wireless music box has no
imaginable commercial value.
Who would pay for a message
sent to nobody in particular?”
— David Sarnoff’s associates
in response to his urgings
for investment in the radio
in the 1920s
“Stocks have reached what
looks like a permanently
high plateau.”
—
Irving Fisher,
Professor of Economics,
Yale University, 1929
“But what…is it good for?”
— Engineer at the
Advanced Computing
Systems Division of IBM,
commenting on the microchip,
1968
“I think there is a
world market for
maybe five computers.”
— Thomas Watson
President, IBM, 1943
“Computers in the
future may weigh no
more than 1.5 tons.”
— Popular Mechanics, 1949,
forecasting the relentless march of science
“There is no reason
anyone would want
a computer in the home.”
— Kenneth Olsen
Founder, Digital Equipment Corp.
(Compaq), 1977
“Six hundred forty K
ought to be enough
for anybody.”
— Bill Gates
Founder and CEO,
Microsoft, 1981
“The concept is interesting and
well-formed, but in order to earn
better than a ‘C,’ the idea must
be feasible.”
— A Yale University management
professor in response to Fred Smith’s
paper proposing reliable overnight
express delivery service. (Smith went
on to found Federal Express Corp.)
“A cookie store is a bad idea.
Besides, the market research
reports say America likes crispy
cookies, not soft and chewy
cookies like you make.”
— Response to Debbie Fields’
idea of starting
Mrs. Fields’ Cookies
“We don’t like their
sound, and guitar music
is on the way out.”
— Decca Recording Co.,
rejecting the Beatles,
1962
“At the present state of the
investigation of consciousness
we don’t know how it works
and we need to try all kinds
of different ideas.”
— JOHN SEARLE
______________________________
J. Consciousness Studies; 2(1):1995.
“Nobody has the slightest idea
how anything material could be
conscious. Nobody even knows
what it would be like to have
the slightest idea about how
anything material could be
conscious. So much for the
philosophy of consciousness.”
— JERRY A. FODOR
______________________________________
The big idea. NY Times Literary Supplement;
July 3, 1992.
THE BENOR SURVEY
(1990)
131 controlled trials of spiritual
healing in a variety of species
• 56 show statistically significant
results (P < 0.01)
• 21 show statistically significant
results (P < 0.02-0.05)
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Benor DJ. Spiritual Healing. Southfield, MI: Vision; 2002.
Summary as of March 2004:
• Nine randomized controlled clinical
trials of distant healing/intercessory prayer
in humans have been published; five have
yielded statistically significant results.
• Eight systematic or meta-analyses of the
human clinical studies have been
published; seven have reached positive
conclusions.
The big picture:
• Dossey L. REINVENTING MEDICINE.
San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco;
1999.
• Jonas WB, Crawford CC. HEALING,
INTENTION, AND ENERGY MEDICINE:
SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH METHODS
AND CLINICAL APPLICATIONS. New
York: Churchill Livingstone; 2003.
Randolph C. Byrd
“The Effects of Intercessory
Prayer in a Coronary Care
Unit Population”
______________________
Southern Medical Journal. 1988; 81(7):
826-829.
Mitchell Krucoff, Suzanne Crater, et al.
“Integrative Noetic Therapies as Adjuncts to
Percutaneous Intervention During Unstable
Coronary Syndromes: Monitoring and
Actualization of Noetic Training (MANTRA)
Feasibility Pilot.”
_______________________________________
American Heart Journal. 2001; 142(5): 760-767.
K. Y. Cha, D. P. Wirth, R. Lobo
“Does Prayer Influence the Success
of In Vitro Fertilization-Embryo
Transfer? Report of a Masked,
Randomized Trial.”
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J. Reproductive Medicine. 2001; 46(9): 781-787.
F. Sicher, E. Targ, D. Moore, H. S. Smith
“A Randomized Double-blind Study
of the Effect of Distant Healing
in a Population with Advanced AIDS—
Report of a Small-scale Study.”
___________________________________________
Western Journal of Medicine. 1998; 169(6): 356-363.
How does it work?
Mechanism of Era III events
“Something unknown
is doing we don’t know what.”
— SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON
“If the human brain were
so simple that we could
understand it, we would
be so simple that we
couldn’t.”
— EMERSON PUGH
________________________
The Biological Origin of Human Values, 1977.
How does it work?
“There is no answer.”
There never has been an answer.
There never will be an answer.
That’s the answer.”
— GERTRUDE STEIN
Consciousness:
Evolving Hypotheses
David J. Chalmers
Amit Goswami
Robert G. Jahn
Russell Targ
Elizabeth Rauscher
Rupert Sheldrake
Joop M. Houtkooper
Henry P. Stapp
Nick Herbert
Harald Walach
David Bohm
Ervin Laszlo
Brian Josephson
C. J. S. Clarke
Helmut Schmidt
Consciousness:
Evolving Hypotheses
Consciousness is fundamental in the
universe, perhaps on a par with matter
and energy. It is not produced by the
brain nor reducible to it.
— DAVID J. CHALMERS
University of Arizona
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Chalmers DJ. The puzzle of conscious experience.
Scientific American . 1995;273(6): 80-6.
“Skeptics”
“This is the sort of thing
I would not believe,
even if it were true.”
— FAMOUS SKEPTIC
“Often in science the reaction
to a new finding is directly
proportional to the strength of
the dogma it overturns.
People are still in denial of the
theory of relativity, too.”
— ELIAS ZERHOUNI
Director, NIH
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US News & World Report. November 18, 2002
… science changes funeral
by funeral….
—
MAX PLANCK
“It is harder to
crack a prejudice
than an atom.”
—
ALBERT EINSTEIN
“It is the responsibility of scientists
never to suppress knowledge, no
matter how awkward that knowledge
is, no matter how it may bother those
in power. We are not smart enough to
decide which pieces of knowledge are
permissible and which are not....”
— CARL SAGAN
_______________________________________
UCLA Commencement Speech, June 14, 1991
thank you
thank you
Why Distant Healing?
Why Now?
Larry Dossey, MD
UTMB
Galveston, TX
March 12, 2004
NONLOCAL MIND
•
Omnipresent
•
Eternal, immortal
“Mind by its very nature
is a singulare tantum. I
should say, the over-all
number of minds is just
one.”
— ERWIN SCHRöDINGER
“The borders of our minds
are ever shifting and many
minds can flow into one
another … and create or
reveal a single mind, a
single energy.”
— W. B. YEATS
After the miracles —
what then?
NONLOCAL MIND
•
Omnipresent
•
Eternal, immortal
ETERNITY
MEDICINE
Caveat
“The ark was made by amateurs
and the Titanic by experts.
Don’t wait for the experts.”
— MURRAY COHEN
Consciousness:
Evolving Hypotheses
“My position [on consciousness] demands
a major revolution in physics…. [T]here is
something very fundamental missing from
current science. Our understanding at
this time is not adequate and we’re going
to have to move to new regions of science….”
— SIR ROGER PENROSE
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Sir Roger Penrose. Quoted in: Karl Giberson. The man who fell to
earth. Interview with Sir Roger Penrose. Science & Spirit. March/April;
2003: 34-41.
Consciousness:
Evolving Hypotheses
“The new physics presents prima facie evidence
that our human thoughts are linked to nature by
nonlocal connections: what a person chooses to
do in one region seems immediately to effect what
is true elsewhere in the universe….[O]ur thoughts
… DO something.”
— HENRY P. STAPP
UC-Berkeley
_________________________________________________________________
Stapp HP. Harnessing science and religion: Implications of the new scientific
conception of human beings. Research News. Feb. 2001;1(6):8.
Are natural laws violated?
“Today’s physics allows for the existence of
‘paranormal’ phenomena of telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis….The whole concept
of ‘nonlocality’ in contemporary physics
requires this possibility.”
—
O. COSTA de BEAUREGARD
__________________________________________________________
O. C. de Beauregard. The paranormal is not excluded from physics.
J. Scientific Exploration. 1998;12(2):315-320.
Are natural laws violated?
“If such phenomena indeed occur, no change
in the fundamental equations of physics
would be needed to describe them.”
—
GERALD FEINBERG
____________________________________________________________
G. Feinberg. Precognition — a memory of things future. In: Quantum
Physics and Parapsychology. L. Oteri (ed.). New York, NY: ParaPsychology Foundation; 1975:54-73.
Time-displaced events:
B. Olshansky, L. Dossey
“Retroactive Prayer:
A Preposterous Hypothesis?”
______________________________________
British Medical Journal.
Dec. 20, 2003; 327: 1465-68.
Br5-68.cal Journal. December 20,
“Our poor deaf ears, nor those
of any physician in Venice,
cannot hear them; thrice fortunate
those in London who can.”
— Emilio Parigiano, elderly and
eminent Venetian physician, 1635,
to the Englishman William Harvey,
who discovered the circulation of the
blood. Parigiano was cynically
questioning the existence of heart
sounds, which Harvey considered
important.
“The abdomen, the chest, and
the brain will forever be shut
from the intrusion of the wise
and humane surgeon.”
—
Sir John Eric Ericksen,
British surgeon, appointed
Surgeon Extraordinary to
Queen Victoria, 1873
“Louis Pasteur’s theory of
germs is ridiculous fiction.”
—
Pierre Pachet,
Professor of Physiology
at Toulouse, 1872
“Drill for oil? You mean
drill into the ground to try
and find oil? You’re crazy.”
— Drillers who Edwin L. Drake
tried to enlist to his project
to drill for oil, 1859
“I’m just glad it’ll be Clark
Gable who’s falling on his
face and not Gary Cooper.”
—
Gary Cooper on his decision
not to take the leading role
in “Gone With The Wind.”
“I have traveled the length and
breadth of this country and talked
with the best people, and I can
assure you that data processing is
a fad that won’t last the year.”
— The editor in charge of business
books for Prentice Hall, 1957
“One of my grandmothers was a notorious
and successful faith healer. One of my cousins
was for many years the editor of the Journal of
the Society for Psychical Research. Both these
ladies were well educated, highly intelligent,
and were fervent believers in paranormal
phenomena….Their beliefs were based on
personal experience and careful scrutiny of
evidence. Nothing that they believed was
incompatible with science.”
— Freeman
Dyson
_____________________________________________________________________________
Dyson F. One in a million. The New York Review of Books.
LI (5): March 25, 2004: 4-6.