Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine [Paperback]

Larry Dossey (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 19, 1995

Proving prayer to be as valid and vital a healing tool as drugs or surgery, the bestselling author of Meaning & Medicine and Recovering the Soul offers a bold integration of science and spirituality.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

Physician Dossey (Medicine and Meaning, 1991, etc.) continues to probe links between medicine and spirituality in this popular study of the healing power of prayer. Prayer heals? Hardly news in the religious world, where Hebrew Bible and New Testament alike attest to prayer's medicinal effects. But for science, it's a revelation, one confirmed by dozens of laboratory experiments that Dossey cites. Prayer can help with high blood pressure, asthma, heart attacks, headaches, and anxiety; moreover, it can alter enzyme activity, blood cell growth, and the germination of seeds. Dossey rejects the traditional Judeo-Christian notion of prayer as a relationship to a transcendental God, offering instead his own quasi-pantheistic view of prayer as a ``genuinely nonlocal event'' directed to the ``Absolute'' in all things. In any case, prayer apparently works: Even unconscious or dream prayer, it seems, can be effective. At the same time, prayers often remain unfulfilled, and Dossey blasts New Agers for preaching that illness is the patient's fault and that physical health always reflects spiritual health, pointing out that many saints have suffered from terrible physical or emotional maladies. An attitude of reverence and optimism is the best approach, he says, to spiritual and physical well-being. Not likely to sway hard-core materialists, especially when Dossey dips into the deep end by asserting that patients can rewrite their medical histories by ``intervening in subatomic processes in the past.'' Nonetheless, this raises new questions (Should you ask permission before praying for someone else? Should a physician pray for his patients?) about an old but little-studied phenomenon. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Larry Dossey, M.D., is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Healing Words, and Prayer Is Good Medicine. An authority on spiritual healing, he lectures throughout the country and has been a frequent guest on Oprah, Good Morning America, CNN, and The Learning Channel. He is responsible for introducing innovations in spiritual care to acclaimed institutions across the country. He currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; 1st edition (January 19, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062502522
• ISBN-13: 978-0062502520
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #277,461 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 79 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the very very best self-healing books! June 2, 1999

By John Selby

Format:Mass Market Paperback

I've known Larry (the author) since the old times when everyone in medicine seemed to scoff professionally at his interest in the healing power of prayer. Now, quite rapidly, science is catching up with Larry's insights, and we realize just how powerfully our thoughts, spiritual and otherwise, influence our physical bodies.

Larry's book still stands as a classic presentation of the power of prayer in healing. His text offers a very complete presentation of the large amount of research that has in fact been conducted, to prove the power of prayer. And from reading this book, you discover from the studies, what works and what doesn't, which prayer variables are active and which don't matter ... really astounding insights come from this book - plus pragmatic guidelines for how we can all use our own minds and our link with the divine, no matter our particular religious preference, for helping us gain and maintain optimum health - and helping others as well.

70 of 77 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Nonlocal mind and the (possible) power of prayer July 16, 2001

By John S. Ryan

Format:Mass Market Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

It's probably tempting to dismiss this book as "New Age" claptrap. That would be a mistake.

In fact Dossey is highly critical of the "New Age" movement. And despite some overblown cover blurbs, he doesn't claim to have "proven" anything about the power of prayer in healing; he's making suggestions and exploring possibilities, not laying down law.

Nor, for the most part, is his speculation wild or unfounded. His suggestions are founded on two things: empirical research that seems to show prayer is effective in promoting the biological growth of certain forms of life under controlled laboratory conditions, and the theological/philosophical view that reality is ultimately a single, universal, "nonlocal" Absolute Mind.

However controversial these foundations might be, he presents his suggestions with proper caution. And he is especially careful to avoid falling into the New Age blame-the-patient trap; he is well aware that prayer doesn't always achieve the results we might like and that this isn't because somebody has done something to "choose" or "deserve" ill health.

On the contrary, he has a healthy sense that prayer is really (though this language isn't quite his) for the purpose of adjusting us to the Divine Will rather than vice-versa. (Anthony de Mello tells a story somewhere about a man who said, "In your country it is regarded as a miracle when God does the will of a human being. In my country it is regarded as a miracle when a human being does the will of God.") On his view, the "power" of prayer is shown as much in our acceptance of our health limitations as in their elimination.

There are a couple of places where Dossey threatens to wander off the deep end (e.g. his suggestion that prayer can change the past), and there's a little bit of language (e.g. "Era I, Era II, and Era III") that recalls bad 1970s self-help books. But I really have only one bone to pick with Dossey: he tends at times to overstate the difference between his views and those of traditional, "classical" theism.

There is a tendency among those (of whom I am one, which is in part how I know this) who left their childhood religions in their early teens to assume, more or less unconsciously, that our understanding of such religion was complete at that time and none of its adherents understood any of the cool things we went on to discover for ourselves. It's hard to shake one's implicit belief that those hidebound "fundamentalists" couldn't _possibly_ have known any of this nifty "spirituality" stuff; "dogmatic" religion is, of course, the arch-enemy of "true" spirituality -- isn't it?

Dossey has a very mild tendency in this direction. In consequence I suspect he will occasionally leave more traditional religious believers with the sense that they are being misunderstood, patronized, or both.

But it doesn't happen very often, and it hardly happens at all in this book. On the whole, Dossey's approach tends to confirm rather than undermine the great theistic religions' view of prayer.

39 of 43 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A wealth of information on prayer-based healing! May 6, 2000

By Cynthia Sue Larson TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Mass Market Paperback

Dr. Dossey explains in HEALING WORDS how prayer-based healing works. It has been scientifically proven in hundreds of experiments to be a balanced part of health care that can significantly decrease health problems and significantly improve our quality and quantity of life. Dossey shares some of his own real-life stories of caring for patients... including an American Indian shaman, who requested Dr. Dossey's medical help for his aching neck! This book contains a wealth of information about prayer experiments written in Dossey's characteristically down-to-Earth style. I love the way Dossey raises questions about whether some prayer experiments are ethical, and why some scientists continue to resist the mounting body of evidence that so clearly shows how prayer has a powerful effect on healing.