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.


Book Description
In this groundbreaking classic linking prayer and health, physician Larry Dossey shares the latest evidence connecting prayer, healing, and medicine. Using real-life examples and personal anecdotes, Dossey proves how prayer can be as valid a healing tool as drugs or surgery. Dossey explores which methods of prayer show the greatest potential for healing; presents compelling evidence that patients' and doctors' belief in a treatment increases its efficacy; explains that discoveries in modern physics allow us to integrate the spiritual and the scientific and make the power of prayer provable in the lab; and much more. Provocative, engaging, and powerfully instructive, Healing Words restores the spiritual art of healing to the science of medicine.


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.

ANNOTATION

"...a thoughtful exploration of the psychophysiology of mind/body healing."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

Author Biography: