healing research what we know and don't know; larry dossey (vol 19 no 1)

7/30/2019 Healing Research What We Know and Don't Know; Larry Dossey (Vol 19 No 1)

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Community Address

HEALING RESEARCH: WHAT WEKNOW AND DONT KNOW

by Larry Dossey, M.D.

ABSTRACT

Since the first major clinical trial of prayer at San Francisco General Hospital was published in1988, numerous follow-up studies have emerged in both humans and nonhumans. Assessmentsand reviews of this field have varied wildly. Dr. Dossey will offer his view of where this fieldstands, and will offer guidelines on how best to do healing experiments.

Dr. Dossey will survey the history of healing research, describe its accomplishments andshortcomings, and discuss the challenges in this field for the future.

KEYWORDS: distant healing, intercessory prayer, randomized double-blind controlled trials, remotehealing, consciousness, quantum physics, experimenter effect, parapsychology

Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine Volume 19 Number 1 Page 9


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The sensible thing would be to quit whileIm ahead, but not being sensible, I willpersevere. Its just great to be back. Itsbeen about five years since I had theopportunity to rant here and offend folks.

ISSSEEM has sort of changed since I washere the last time. This has become one ofthe premiere watering holes internationallyfor people who are interested in healing. Iam absolutely honored to return.

They say confession is good for the soul, soI want to begin with one. This is a confes-sion of ignorance. Lewis Thomas was one

of the great medical researchers at Sloan-Kettering, and also one of the most gracefulessayists that my profession produced duringthe last century. He said, The only solidpiece of scientific truth about which I feeltotally confident is that we are profoundlyignorant about nature. He continued, It isthis sudden confrontation with the depth andthe scope of ignorance that represents themost significant contribution of twentiethcentury science to the human intellect.

This is the part of my talk that focuses onwhat we dont know. I think its refreshingto begin here. You know, you can find theseconfessions in many areas. There are quitea number physicists today who are willingto say we dont really understand very muchabout what we are trying to talk about. An

example is Willie Fischler, who is at thetheory group in the department of physicsat University of Texas in Austin, my oldalma mater. He said, We dont really knowhow the universe works. Were like littlekids in the forest who are walking and tryingto find their way.

Some people consider physicist StephenHawking to be the smartest guy on theplanet right now. Hawking is on record assaying, We have no idea how the worldreally is. All we do is build up models which

seem to prove our theories. I have to say,with all due respect to Professor Hawking,my grandmother knew this. I grew up anidentical twin. When my twin brother andI were really little, and wed do somethingincredibly dumb and get into badtroublewhich was most of the timemygrandmother would always say, To be sosmart, you boys just dont know very much.

Wes Nisker, the meditation teacher, put itwell: Just imagine how good it would feelif we all got together once in a while in largepublic gatherings, and admitted that wedont know why were alive, that nobodyknows for sure if theres a higher being whocreated us, and that nobody really knows

what the hells going on here.

Then theres this question about whether we

are equipped to know what we want toknow. Emerson Pugh, the eminentbiologist, said, If the brain were so simple

we could understand it, we would be sosimple that we couldnt. Were in deeptrouble, folks. This is not a new and novelposition; Simone Weil said, Bragging aboutones intelligence is like an animal braggingabout the size of its cage.

Lets switch over to what we do know. Wehave learned a little something. Dr. DanBenor, a former president of ISSSEEM,corralled all the healing studies back in 1990that had been done until then. At that timehe came up with 131 of them, not just in



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people, but also in other species and in non-human biological systems. He found thatapproximately two-thirds of these experi-ments showed statistically significant results.The best recent systematic analysis is by Dr.

Wayne Jonas, who is former director of theNational Center for Complementary and

Alternative Medicine at NIH, and hisresearch assistant Cindy Crawford.1 Theyfound 122 laboratory studies, which lookedat the ability of intentionality to affect somesystem in a laboratory that you can reallycontrol with high specificity. They alsofound 80 randomized controlled trials of

healing in people. Now, the skeptics say,well, numbers dont matter the studies areno good, period. So Dr. Jonas andCrawford did something that no one hasdone in one of these analyses: they gradedthe quality of all of these studies by applying

what are called CONSORT criteria:Consolidated Standards for ReportingTrials. They found that the mind/matterinteraction studies (the laboratory type)

were of A quality, the highest you can get.The prayer and healing intention studies

were given a B, or a fair grade. For afield that is this young, this is anoutstanding report.

So, when you hear skeptics say there are nostudies, you dont have to go there.Moreover, when you hear them say the

studies are no good, you dont have to buyinto that either.

If you fast-forward to the present day: As ofJune 2008, we have around 22 majorrandomized, double-blind, controlled clinicaltrials published, of distant healing/inter-

cessory prayer in people. Eleven of thesehave demonstrated statistically significantresults, which is far more than you wouldexpect by chance. According to my count,

we have seen eight systematic or meta-

analyses published in peer-reviewed litera-ture, and seven of these have arrived atgenerally positive conclusions.

For the sake of people who may not befamiliar with what this field looks like, Ill

just hit the high spots of about three or fourpositive studies, and then Im going to payspecial attention to one that was not positive.

The study that got this field rolling waspublished in 1988 by Dr. Randolph Byrd,a board-certified staff cardiologist at UCSFSchool of Medicine. This study was donein the coronary care unit at San FranciscoGeneral Hospital. It involved about 400patients with heart attack or acute chestpain who were hospitalized in the cardiaccare unit. Roughly half of these people

were prayed for by having their first namesfarmed out to various prayer groups aroundthe country. The other half were notassigned special prayer. The people who

were in the intervention group, receivinglong-distance intercessory prayer, unknownto them, did better statistically on severalclinical counts.2

This study was essentially replicated elevenyears later, by Dr. William Harris at the Mid-

America Heart Institute in Kansas City. Youmay wonder why it took so long elevenyears later. It took that long for us in theprofession to recover from the shock, and therealization that you can take healing



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of AIDS-associated illnesses, which killpatients with advanced AIDS things likepneumocystis pneumonia, encephalitis, andso on.5

For a while, the best-known study that hadbeen done to date came out of DukeUniversity Medical Center by Dr. MitchellKrucoff and Suzanne Crater and their team.It looked at subjects who had undergone acardiac catheterization. They found that ifpatients undergoing cardiac catheterization

intentions or prayer into a clinical setting, andtest it pretty much like you would a newmedication. But Dr. Harris did precisely that:a randomized, controlled trial of the effectsof remote, intercessory prayer on outcomes in

patients admitted to the coronary care unit.Harris showed that patients in the coronarycare unit who were assigned intercessoryprayer did significantly better than those who

were not assigned prayer.3

Another study looked at the ability ofwomen to become pregnant following invitro fertilization and embryo transfer at a

fertility clinic in Seoul, South Korea. Youveheard of double-blind studies; this was atriple-blind study. The subjects thepatients and the physicians taking care ofthem hadn't a clue that the study waseven going on. Now, you can argue aboutthe ethics of that (and I think you should) but in any case, this study showed that

women who were assigned intercessoryprayer from prayer groups in Canada, theUnited States, and Australia had twice thesuccessful pregnancy rate as women who

were not assigned intercessory prayer. Theodds against chance in this study weresomething like 1000 to 1.4

A legendary study was done by Dr.Elisabeth Targ, again in California. This

was done at California Pacific Medical

Center. They looked at the ability ofhealers following many different paradigmsof healing many different traditions ofhealing to make a difference in patients

who were suffering from advanced AIDS.These people, who were extended distanthealing, had a statistically lower incidence

Elisabeth Targ1961-2002


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on, one saw tremendously positive results inthe group that was extended healing prayer.

Now, everybody wants to know how thisstuff works. Were up against it here; no

one really has a clear idea about how remotehealing and prayer work, although we arenot nearly as desperate for hypotheses assome people maintain. In order tounderstand how this works, were going tohave to understand something aboutconsciousness, and therein lies the rub.

John Searle may be the most prestigiousmind-body philosopher in the country

currently. He said, At the present state ofthe investigation of consciousness, we dontknow how it works and we need to try allkinds of different ideas. This is anotherconfession of ignorance for you.

We can find many comments of this sort.Jerry Foder is another prestigious mind-body philosopher at Rutgers: Nobody hasthe slightest idea how anything materialcould be conscious. Nobody even knows

what it would be like to have the slightestidea about how anything material could beconscious. So much for the philosophy ofconsciousness.

An idea that is out of favor by mostresearchers doing theoretical work inhealing is the notion that there is some

physical signal that passes between thehealer and healee. But if there is no signal,how can healing happen? Heres theanswer: Something unknown is doing wedont know what. (Sir Arthur Eddington,1882-1944) I have actually appropriatedthis explanation for all the mysteries in my

received prayer unknown to them theyhad 50 to 100% fewer side effects than people

who were not assigned intentional prayer.6

These researchers then expanded the study

to about eight more major hospitalsthroughout the country, this time recruitingintercessory prayer from a variety of groups.This was the so-called MANTRA II phaseof their randomized study.7

In this phase of the study, if you looked at allthe statistical data and did all the number-crunching, you could not show that the

people who were assigned intercessory prayerhad any advantage. However, if you unpackthe data and look for trends within the study,you could find that the people who wereextended music, imagery and touch therapyhad a lower six-month mortality rate than thecontrols, and the lowest absolute death rates

were found in people who had music, imagery,and touch therapy combined with prayer.

They combined into this study something thatwell be coming back to later somethingcalled two-tiered prayer. What they did in themiddle of the study, because they were havingtrouble recruiting subjects, was to go out andrecruit another prayer group. They askedthese people not to pray specifically for thesubjects in the study, because that would havechanged the study design midstream; they

didnt want to do that. They just simply askedthis second prayer group to pray for thesuccess of the study: that it could finish ontime, and that people would resumevolunteering as subjects. Beginning with theaddition of this back-up prayer group, the data

just took off in the study. From that point


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called the godfather of quantum theory, itsprobably Professor Henry Stapp at UC-Berkeley. Professor Stapp says, The newphysics presents prima facie evidence thatour human thoughts are linked to nature by

non-local connections: what a personchooses to do in one region seems immedi-ately to affect what is true elsewhere in theuniverse . . . [O]ur thoughts . . . DOsomething.

Sir Roger Penrose is one of the people whothink that appealing to current concepts inmodern physics is not going to be enough.

He says, My position [on consciousness]demands a major revolution in physics . . .[T]here is something very fundamentalmissing from our current science. Ourunderstanding at this time is not adequateand we are going to have to move to newregions of science. . .

I really admire this position, because youdont have to use your imagination to findsome things that are missing in currentphysics that are absolutely crucial to ahealing endeavor. For example, consider theconcept of meaning what things mean topeople in their life and the role ofempathy and compassion and love in thehealing effort, without which healingusually doesnt get off the ground. You willsearch quantum physics textbooks ad

infinitum, and you will find they saynothing about these kinds of subjectivefactors that are crucial in healing.

Paul Davies has made a significant contribu-tion to this area of thought. He says, Ibelong to the group of scientists who do not

life. This explanation has never failed me.I highly recommend it use it freely. Sir

Arthur Eddington was talking about theuncertainty principle in modern physics

when he made this comment, but I think

this is applicable to how remote healinghappens. Sometimes I switch off to Dr.Seusss explanation: It just happened tohappen.

People have been struggling with themysteries of consciousness and how it mightintervene in the context of physics for anawful long time. A premier example is

Wolfgang Pauli, who won a Nobel Prize inthe 50s. He said, The only acceptable pointof view appears to be the one that recognizesboth sides of reality the quantitative andthe qualitative, the physical and thepsychical as compatible with each other,and can embrace them simultaneously.

It simply is not true that we have nohypotheses in this field about whats goingon with remote healing. We have quite alist of evolving hypothoses. These are non-transmission type theories; they hinge onconcepts that have come out of quantummechanics. Dean mentioned some of these.The name of his recent book is EntangledMinds, which invokes the concept ofentanglement in quantum mechanics.People go with the notion of non-locality,

observation effects and so on. DavidChalmers, one of the leading thinkers inthis field, maintains that consciousness isfundamental in the universe, perhaps on apar with matter and energy; it is notproduced by the brain, nor reducible to it.If anyone in the country deserves to be


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who probably studied more healers thananybody else alive, was the head of theSloan Physics Laboratory at Yale for manyyears. Margenau said, Strangely, it does notseem possible to find the scientific laws or

principals violated by the existence of [non-local phenomena]. We can find contradic-tions between [their occurrence] and ourculturally accepted view of reality, but not as many of us have believed between[their occurrence] and the scientific lawsthat have been so laboriously developed.

I want to circle back to the studies, and

focus on a study out of Harvard MedicalSchool that may have eclipsed the Byrdstudy as the most famous prayer study everdone. This was published a couple of yearsago in the American Heart Journal thefirst prayer study that journal everpublished. It was done by a dear friend ofmine, Dr. Herb Benson at Harvard, whohas made fundamental contributions to

what hes called over the years therelaxation response. I hope my comments

wont be taken out of context; Herb is agood friend of mine, and although what I

will say sounds critical, it is not meant asanything personal. I think Herb wouldagree that its our job to analyze thesehealing studies to try to find the best wayforward.

This study was called the STEP study,which is an acronym for the Study ofTherapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer.8

This study was done with coronary bypasspatients. Now, its a little complicatedsetting this up, so just hang in there with

subscribe to a conventional religion, butnevertheless deny that the universe is apurposeless accident, he says. There mustbe, it seems to me, a deeper level of explana-tion. Furthermore, Ive come to the point of

view that mind that is, conscious awarenessof the world is not a meaningless andincidental quirk of nature, but an absolutefundamental facet of reality. Go Paul.

One of my favorite theorizers in this fieldis Professor Costa de Beauregard, who wasan eminent French physicist. Todaysphysics allows for the existence of

paranormal phenomena of telepathy,precognition and psychokinesis . . . thewhole concept of non-locality in contem-porary physics requires this possibility.This is an important point of view, becauseyou will hear skeptics and cynics from

within the physics community say that noneof this stuff that were here to discuss at thisconference could possibly be true because

we know that if it were true, this wouldviolate the laws of nature. So we know fromthe get-go that what were all talking aboutmust be nonsense; weve made somefundamental mistake. Well, Ive beenlooking for laws of nature with respect toconsciousness and I cant find any. Andneither can several other people. DeBeauregard continues, Far from beingirrational, the paranormal is postulated by

todays physics. Gerald Feinberg, theeminent American physicist, agrees, saying,If such phenomena indeed occur, nochange in the fundamental equations ofphysics would be needed to describe them.Physicist Henry Margenau, who collabo-rated with psychologist Lawrence LaShan,


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group you would assume would do the bestof all if prayer were effective, because theyknew beforehand that they would be prayedfor. This knowledge would have revved upthe placebo effect, which would have added

to whatever positive effect of prayer theremay have been. But this group did the

worst of all a 59% post-op complicationrate, which was statistically significant.

Well, this just stirred everybody up. Themedia had a field day with this strangeoutcome. I was on a book tour when thisstudy was published, and the media made

my life miserable for about two weeks. Forabout 48 hours this experiment was featuredon CNN. Because Harvard has suchimmense prestige and gravitas, the skepticsadored saying things like, The verdict is in.Harvard has proved that prayer doesnt

work. As a matter fact, it might even hurtpeople.

If you were designing the study, there areseveral scenarios you could imagine thatmight get played out. If prayer is effective,then C would do the best of all thats thegroup who knew they were going to getprayed for because they would not onlyhave the positive effect of prayer, but alsothe benefit of the placebo response.Moreover, A would have done better thanB, because B was the group that wasnt

prayed for, and A was. B would be expectedto do the worst of all, because they weredenied assigned prayer. Did that happen?No. So it looks like prayer isnt effective,right? Well, what if prayer really is noteffective? Then you would have seen A, B,and C fare pretty equally, because thered be

me. This study looked at over 1800patients undergoing coronary bypass surgeryin six different big hospitals around thecountry. These 1800 people were roughlydivided into three groups. A third of the

patients were told they might or might notbe prayed for, and they actuallywereprayedfor: thats group A. A third of the patients

were told they might or might not beprayed for, and they were not prayed for:thats group B. And a third of the patients

were told they definitely were going to beprayed for, and theywerein fact prayed for:thats group C.

Here's how it looked from the inside: oneProtestant and two Catholic prayer groups

were going to do the praying. They weregiven a scripted prayer; they were told topray for a good outcome of the surgery, andfor few side effects following it. After theyprayed this written scripted prayer, thenthey could pray any way they wanted to.They prayed for two weeks, for people

whom they had never met strangerspraying for strangers. The prayers werebegun on the eve of surgery, or the day ofsurgery. The people praying were given thefirst name and the initial of the last nameof the individuals on their prayer list.

Heres what happened: Group A (thepatients who were told they might or might

not be prayed for and wereprayed for) hada 52% complication rate after surgery.Group B (who were told that they might ormight not be prayed for and theywerenotprayed for) had a statistically identical rateof complications: 51%. Heres the ringer inthis study; its this Group C. This is the


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I just really dont know if Im going to prayfor you or not. This borders on lunacy.But all double-blind studies fall into thistrap. No one in a double-blind prayerstudy knows for sure whether or not theyre

going to be prayed for. Also, a very strangefeature of the Harvard study is that theplacebo effect went missing. The re-searchers at Harvard have been among thegreatest proponents of the placebo responsein clinical studies of all therapies. So whathappened to the venerable placebo responsein the STEP study?

So, I have to conclude that STEP wasessentially not a prayer study, because itfailed to assess the way prayer is used in reallife. They didnt examine prayer in the

wild, the way we free-range humans use it.Even so, Ive got to give Harvard credit: thisis one of the most instructive prayer studiesever done, because it illustrates the pitfallsand mistakes that researchers can fall into

when they try to subject prayer and distanthealing intentions to randomized controlleddouble-blind study designs. As Ive alreadymentioned, this study has had a profoundchilling effect on research in this field,because now it really takes a courageousyoung researcher to say, I want to do aprayer experiment, even though Harvardhas proved it isnt effective.

Its interesting to speculate about whatscrewed up this study so sensationally. Onepossibility is what Ive called the problemof extraneous prayer. Heres what one ofthe STEP co-authors said in a press releasethat was hurriedly issued from Harvard afterthe study was published: One caveat [of

no effect from the prayer, although maybeC would have done a little bit better becausethey still would have had the placeboresponse going for them.

But everyone shied away from thepossibility that prayer might harmsomebody. What would this outcome havelooked like? If prayer were harmful, B

would have done the best of all, becausethey were not assigned prayer. But B didnot do the best of all. So none of thesepossibilities were observed. So what in the

world went on at Harvard?

If we unpack this study, what can we sayabout it? The first thing that just leaps outfor me is that nowhere in the world is prayerused the way it was used in this study. Peoplesay that we pray for our loved ones, right?

What does this mean? Well, for one thing,you know them, you care deeply aboutthem, you love them, youre empathictowards them, youre emotionally bonded

with them, and you have deep compassionfor them. In the STEP study, strangersprayed for strangers. I think this cannotbut reduce the level of empathy andcompassion thats felt between the peopleinvolved. Also, what about telling two-thirds of these people that you may or maynot be prayed for? In real life we pray forour loved ones unconditionally. Think

about it this way: if your poor old mom isin the hospital, and is going to havecoronary bypass surgery tomorrow, you donot go to her bedside tonight and say, WellMom, I know youre going to have yourchest cracked open tomorrow, and youregoing to have your heart operated on, but


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congregation down at the church orsynagogue. So the individuals in groups Aand B may have been so afraid theyd bedenied prayer that they really dug in andrecruited prayer, which may have exceeded

the level of prayer in group C, the group thatwas officially assigned prayer. So they mayhave had more prayer going for them, andthis may have accounted for the fact thatthey did better statistically than group C.

Then theres the experimenter effect: theimpact of a persons belief system,

worldview, assumptions, thoughts and

intentions on the outcome of the experi-ment. Now, this possibility is consideredlaughable in conventional science, becauseits assumed that the double-blind protocolprotects the data from intrusion frompeoples thoughts and intentions and so on;

what you think about something cannotpenetrate the shielding thats inherent in thedouble-blind design. This is a fallacy; thedata in parapsychology has shown fordecades that you cannot opt out of theexperiment as an experimenter. The experi-menter effect has been proved to be one ofthe most consistent factors in psi research,and it is often quite robust.

So the question comes up: what did thepeople at Harvard think about remotehealing going into this? What do you

think? I believe I can confidently andconservatively say, from my friendships withquite a few Harvard faculty over the years,that the Harvard medical community as a

whole is not enthusiastic toward thepossibility that the effects of consciousintention and prayer can operate remotely,

the study] is that with so many individualsreceiving prayer from friends and family, as

well as personal prayer, it may be impossibleto disentangle the effects of study prayerfrom background prayer. I think thats

right.

Then there are some profound randomiza-tion problems which were not apparent tome until a group in Florida recently lookedat the demographic differences betweenthese A, B, and C groups. Group C (thatsthe group that should have done best,because they had prayer in certainty, as well

as the placebo response going for them) hada higher incidence, going into this study, ofchronic obstructive lung disease, a highersmoking history, a higher requirementduring surgery for three-vessel coronarybypass (not surprising since they had all ofthese risk factors going for them), and alower rate of beta-blocker usage prior tosurgery, which most people say is cardio-protective during heart surgery. So it maybe that group C, because of these random-ization differences, were destined to do

worse which, in fact, they did.

Then there are psychological factors, whichI never seriously considered until a psychia-trist suggested them to me at a meeting (ofall places) on the Harvard campus. He said,If you tell somebody they may or may not

be prayed for (which is what happened ingroup A and B), what do they do? They say,Boy, I may be missing out on prayer in thisdeal, so Id better get things rolling Imgoing to pray fervently for myself, for onething, and Im going to recruit more prayerfrom my loved ones my family, and my


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examples of supposedly rigorous laboratorystudies which were in fact performed underconditions that guaranteed their failurefrom the outset. I think this is a properverdict for the STEP study at Harvard.

I have some suggestions about what weought to do in the future. The main thing

we should be doing is to adapt the researchmethod to the phenomenon, and not the

phenomenon to the research method. This isone of those duh things, but itsastonishing this is so often overlooked. Thebottom line is that we should capture

healing intentions and prayer the waytheyre used in real life.

What would a study that followed thisprecaution actually look like? There is anoutstanding example, which unfortunatelyvery few people know about. It was doneby psychologist and researcher Jeanne

Achterberg. Her bookRituals of Healing:Using Imagery for Health and Wellness, wasco-written with my wife Barbara, whocollaborated with Jeanne for quite a while.

Achterberg used functional magneticresonance imagery (fMRI) to look atchanges in the brain of recipients whilehealers were doing their thing.9

This study took place at the North HawaiiCommunity Hospital in Waimea, on the

northern side of the big island. Thishospital was built by Earl Backen, whoinvented the implantable cardiac pacemakerand established Medtronic, the worldslargest manufacturer of medical devices. Heand his wife Doris retired to the big island.Earl thought they might need a hospital one

at a distance, to change the course of illness.Many are quite open to the positive effectsof ones thoughts and intentions on onesownbody, but not on the body of a distantindividual who does not even know that

positive intentions or prayers are beingdirected toward her.

After the STEP study, a host of criticscharged that the construct validity of thesehealing studies is simply hopeless. They say

we should not even be doing these studies.Are there too many uncontrolled variables,like the experimenter effect, extraneous

prayer, and so on, for these studies ever towork? Should we just bail out of thisresearch agenda? It could be that the fieldis just too difficult. After all, Einstein hunga sign in his office at Princeton that said,Everything that counts cannot be counted,and everything that can be counted doesnot count.

I dont think this field is too difficultI justthink weve been barking up the wrong tree.One of the huge problems in this field isthat we have begun to worship the double-blind method inappropriately. Weve falleninto what Edward Kelly and his group atthe University of Virginia called method-olatry. I apologize for this long quote, butthis says it better than I can: Laboratoryresearch using random samples of subjects,

control groups, and statistical modes of dataanalysis can be wonderfully useful, butobsession with this as the only valid meansof acquiring new knowledge readilydegenerates into methodolotry, themethodological face of scientism . . . Theexperimental literature itself is replete with


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indicated that there was only one chance in10,000 that the results could be explainedby chance.

This looks like real-life healing. The healer-

healee pairs knew each other and wereempathic and compassionate with oneanother. The study is vitally important. It

was conducted in a place where healing wasassumed to happen. Here, remote healing

was not considered scientifically blasphe-mous or heretical. As a matter of fact, thebig island is often referred to as the healingisland. I believe this study embodies the

research methodology we need in order forresearch in this field to go forward.

I have some additional considerations forthe future I want to share with you. Letme emphasize: We need to think beyondthe randomized, controlled, double-blindstudy design in testing healing, because itsubverts the way prayer is used in real life.

We ought to be duplicating in our studiesthe way prayer is used, not subverting it.Furthermore, we ought to encourage singlecase reports, including spontaneousremissions in which disease just up and goesaway. These cases are not rare in the healing

world, but they are dismissed as statisticaloutliers in double-blind studies. But theyoccur in real life, where people know eachother, and they pray for each other, and

send healing intentions absolutely uncondi-tionally.

I suggest also that, prior to every healingstudy, the pre-existing beliefs and worldviewof the experimenters be assessed andrecorded as a formal part of the study. If

day, and since there was no medical facilitythere, he built one.

Mr. Backen has a deep interest in healing,so he funded Dr. Achterbergs study. Jeanne

moved to the big island, settled in, andintegrated herself into the community ofnative Hawaiian healers. They took herinto their confidence and shared with hertheir methods. After two years she wasready to go ahead with the study. Sherecruited eleven healers. Each was told, Goout and select a subject youve worked within the past, with whom youve worked

successfully, and with whom you feelemotionally bonded and, if theyre willing,we will do a test between you and them.The healers were not just casually interestedin healing; the average time theyd spent inhealing work was 23 years. They usedvarious healing methods, which theydescribed as prayer, sending energy, havinggood intentions, or wishing the highestgood. Some simply called their methodhealing.

The subjects had their heads placed in thefMRI machine, and during randomizedintervals, which could not be anticipated bythe subjects, the healers did whatever theydid while the fMRI machine was doing abrain scan. Something extraordinaryhappened: during the send conditions

and not in the no send conditions thebrains of the subjects lit up in specific parts,indicating increased metabolic activity andblood flow in specific areas. The brain areasthat were affected were the frontal,precuneus, and anterior and middlecingulate regions. The statistical analysis


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some intrinsic healing ability. But if wewant to give the experiments the very bestpossibility for a positive outcome, we oughtto study people who are healing prodigies.

I dont see this as a complicated issue.Prodigies exist in practically every field ofhuman endeavor, such as music, art,mathematics, and athletics. Why shouldthe idea of healing prodigies be so offensive?If you want to determine whether humanbeings are capable of running a four-minutemile, you dont recruit subjects like me.

You find the cream of the crop in athletes

in order to answer that question. Themother of all questions in healing researchis: Is anything happening? Is there ahealing effect at all? Or are we foolingourselves? If you want to get the answer, Isuggest you get people who have tremen-dous experience with healing efforts.

But we have to be careful how we approachthis idea of healer selection, because people

who have been designing these studies atleast in one instance have bordered onfalling into religious favoritism andprejudice. The first study out of the box the Byrd study recruited only born-againChristians to do the intercessory prayer,because Dr. Byrd was a born-againChristian, and wanted to shed favorablelight on his religion should the study come

out positive, which it did. Im troubled bythis approach.

I will never forget a conversation I had witha close friend of mine, who was a facultymember at one of the major medical schoolson the east coast. He had never heard of

we did this study after study, year afteryear we would soon know with faircertainty whether or not experimentereffects are really important in this field.

As a corollary, studies involving healingought not to be conducted in the full glareof the media. The Harvard STEP study

was one of the most hyped studies I knowof. My colleagues in this field and I knewabout this study years before it even began.I got emails from researchers on both sidesof the Atlantic wanting inside informationabout this study. What does this level of

attention do? For one thing, it rallies theskeptics and the cynics. If there is such athing as negative experimenter effects, youcan be sure that they were flooding thisstudy with negative intentions. If we didthese studies in a more solitary way, withoutmaking a fuss out of them, we might beable to minimize that sort of thing.

We ought to give more consideration to theselection of healers. Some of the mostsuccessful studies on record, such asElisabeth Targs study with the patients withadvanced AIDS, as well as the Achterbergstudy, have recruited veteran healers people with a couple of decades of experi-ence doing healing work. Other studiesrecruit healers who just happen to beinterested in the study and say they believe

in prayer, so they volunteer to do thepraying. The reason researchers follow thelatter approach is that they want to showthat healing is a democratic, universaltalent, not the possession of an elite few.That is a noble effort, and I agree with thepremise that probably most everybody has


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healing experiments. After a talk I gave, hecornered me in the hall afterwards and said,Larry, I know what weve got to do. Wevegot to have a contest. He was devout inhis particular faith. He said, We need to

develop a quantitative lab experiment thatyou can control precisely, like monitoring therate of growth of bacteria in test tubes. Then

we will have healers representing all thedifferent faiths come in to take the test bysending healing and well see whos best.

I thought this was a joke. He wasdescribing something like a play-off in

sports, but this was a pray-off. He said, Iwant to call this the Elijah test. He was abiblical scholar, and back in the OldTestament, Elijah called on Jehovah to comedown and do something or other, incompetition with hundreds of prophets ofthe pagan god. So the Elijah test was thefirst head-to-head test of intercessory prayer.Finally I asked him, Why do you want todo this? He lit up with incandescent zealand said, I just want to bring praise to theLord. He was completely oblivious to thefact that this would almost certainly createtremendous enmity between faiths or ifhe did realize it, he didnt care. Im happyto report to you that the Elijah test hasnever gotten off the ground, and I hope itnever does. In healing, we ought not to bepromoting winners and losers.

We also ought to pay more attention to theactual techniques that are used in healing,and we dont do a very good job of that.For example, a lot of the tests just invitehealers of many different schools andpersuasions, and if there were one superior

method, we would never know it. Weshould also pay more attention to whetherthere are certain conditions certainpathologies that are more susceptible toremote healing than others. We do that in

conventional medicine; we all know thatappendicitis is a lot easier to cure than abrain tumor and even with brain tumors,some are more susceptible to therapy thanothers. We ought to get ready for somesurprises, because some of the most suscep-tible diseases to remote healing and prayermay prove to be some of the worst illnessesimaginable.

I had my comeuppance on this topic frommy dear departed friend Elisabeth Targ.

When she was planning her study onadvanced AIDS patients, she hadnt yetsettled on the subject population. I waskeenly interested in what illness she wouldchoose to investigate. When I found outthat she had chosen patients with advanced

AIDS, my heart sank. I called her up andsaid, Elisabeth, why advanced AIDS? Whydidnt you pick the flu? Youre going to givehealing a bad name! We dont even havean adequate conventional therapy foradvanced AIDS, and youre trying to curethese people with prayer and healingintentions. She started laughing at me overthe telephone in this beautiful lilting laugh,and she said, Oh Larry, youre such a

wienie! I thought you believed in healing.Advanced AIDS is perfect. If we can makea difference, the skeptics wont be able tosay that it was just the flu it would havegone away anyway. She also said I couldsee her shaking her finger at me over thetelephone And theres another thing you


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need to understand, young man you dontunderstand that healers like a challenge.They would much rather work onsomebody with advanced AIDS thansomebody who has the flu. She turned out

to be right. The study was profoundlypositive, and I learned a humbling lesson.

We ought to determine whether somehealing techniques are compatible orincompatible with conventional drugs andsurgical procedures. Healers are all over theballpark on this; some say it doesnt matter healing goes with anything. Others say they

cant do their healing work if the patient hashad drugs and surgical procedures. Weneed an answer to this, and we haventlooked for it very well.

We need to try to understand, if we can,the interaction between meditation andhealing and prayer. Dean Radin has discov-ered, as have other people, that profoundlyskilled meditators do better, almost always,

with parapsychological tasks. We need toknow if skilled meditators make betterhealers. We dont really have the answer tothis.

We need to try to find what, if any, differ-ences exist between prayer and focusedintentionality. The question here is whensomebody responds to prayer, whether its

the focused intentionality of the persondoing the praying thats causing the change,or if this is being mediated by a supremebeing. I confess that I cannot conceive ofa test that would distinguish between thosetwo possibilities. Until we get some Godmeters that can give us some sort of

readout there, I dont know how we wouldapproach this.

We ought to pay more attention to whatIve already called a tiered design, where you

bring in a second prayer or healing groupto pray not for the patients themselves, butfor the overall success of the study. Therehave been two randomized controlled trialsthat have done this, with very interestingresults. We also should consider a rotatinghealing design in these studies. This meansthat by the end of the study, all of thepatients have been prayed for by all of the

healers. This minimizes any differences inskills that may exist between the healers.The only study I know of which has donethis is Elisabeths positive study withadvanced AIDS patients.

We ought to pay closer attention to theduration and frequency of the healingtherapy, whatever it happens to be. Itsalmost embarrassing to look at some of theprotocols, because theyre all over theballpark. Theres one negative, failed study,looking at the effects of prayer in dialysispatients, in which the healers were prohib-ited from praying for more than fiveminutes. In Elisabeth Targs study, thehealers were required to pray a minimumof two hours a day. Its almost impossibleto compare studies when the protocols are

that different.

I think its time to simply say that healingresearch may not be for everybody. This getsback to the old experimenter effect. I realizethis violates the canons of conventionalscience, where we say that anybody can


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research anything, provided theyve got theskills to do so. This does not hold in an areathat is profoundly susceptible to experimentereffects. Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize-

winning geneticist who worked with genes

and corn plants, once said that her success wasdue the fact that she had a feeling for theorganism. If prayer and healing researchersdont have a feeling for the organism, theyought to go do something else.

Anyone involved in healing research oughtto familiarize him/herself with theaccomplishments in the field of parapsy-

chology. Its embarrassing; you can read theliterature review sections in the publishedhealing studies, and usually you will findnary a mention of any relevant intention-al ity research even in bio logicalsystemsthat has been done for decades bypeople in the field of parapsychology. Thereare any number of books that are availablenow, starting (I would suggest) with DeanRadin's two books: The Conscious Universeand Entangled Minds, that make it easy forpeople to educate themselves about whatsbeen done in psi.

We ought to put more emphasis on simplebench studies and proof of principle studies.The reason is that these can be controlled

with a lot more specificity and elegance thanhuge human studies. Researchers should

give up the goal of trying to hit a home runwith what many people call a killer study,an experiment that is so powerful andpersuasive that it will sweep all of theopposition away. If you read about howscience changes paradigmatically, as inThomas Kuhns book The Structure of

Scientific Revolutions, you find that sciencerarely changes because of one single,massive, convincing study. It changesbecause of the accumulation of individualdata points, year after year, until finally the

scales tip in favor of the new paradigm.The problem you run into with thesekiller type studies like the STEP study atHarvard is: what if they dont work? Thenyou really have a problem on your hands.

This may seem really censorious andcantankerous, but I think we need a timeout in healing research. I would like to

see a temporary moratorium, becausecurrently the protocols in healing experi-ments wander all over the place. Peopledont benefit from scrutinizing prior studiesto see what worked and what didnt.

Amazingly, they even duplicate the methodsthat failed in prior studies. This is nuts. Italso reveals laziness on the part of experi-menters. Perhaps we need a healing summitthat would bring together researchers whoare interested in this field. We could putall of these studies under the microscopeand examine what works and what doesnt.

Anyone who ventures into the field shouldbe respectful of what theyre doing. Again,Elisabeth Targ was my teacher here. She saidto me once, When I go into my lab to doa healing experiment, I feel as if I am

walking on sacred ground. Elisabethcompared her experiments to invitations. Shesaid, When I do one of these studies, itslike Im opening a window to the Absolute.If she chooses to enter, the experiment

works and if not, I go back to the drawingboard to try to design a more pleasing invita-


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tion. For Elisabeth, healing research wasnot a matter of manipulation and control, asit often is for some people. I think the innerlife the spiritual path of the experimenteris of paramount importance. I have never

known any healer who was able to turn outa positive study in this field who was not ona spiritual path, and who did not have a richinner spiritual life.

We ought to stop being so timid about ouraccomplishments. This field did not existforty years ago, and if somebody had toldme then that within a few years wed see

randomized, controlled healing studiescoming out of some of the major medicalschools in the world Harvard, Columbia,Duke, UC San Francisco, and others I

would have considered them a lunatic. Butweve actually seen that, and we should beproud of it.

My friend Leland Kaiser, at the Universityof Colorado, talks about edge runners.These are the people who have been outthere on the edge taking great risks. Thisdescribes a lot of our heroes and heroinesin the field of healing intentionality. Thesefolks can get really discouraged, tired, and

worn out, because theyre always swimmingupstream. Just a few weeks ago, I had aninteresting conversation with one if thegreat healing researchers in our country.

She was having a really bad day. Shelamented to me, Larry, weve learnednothing from all these healing experi-ments its like were back where we startedthirty years ago. So I had an opportunityto talk her down from that ledge. I toldher that, in my opinion, we ought to be

very proud of our accomplishments. Wehave shown that consciousness operatesnon-locally in space and time where healingis concerned. We have discovered implica-tions of immortality and eternality because

of the non-locality of consciousness in time.I suggested to her that we have maderemarkable contributions to human welfareand knowledge, and she said, Really? Ireminded her that she was one of thecontributors.

But we also have to be realistic; the skepticsare not going to fold their tents and go

away. Heres what Dean Radin has saidabout what lies ahead: The implications ofthis field, of course, are heresies of the firstorder but I believe that if the scientificevidence continues to compound, then theaccusation of heresy is an inescapableconclusion that we will eventually have toface from the skeptics. I also believe thatthe implications of all of this are sufficientlyremote from the ingrained ways of thinkingthat the first reaction to this work will beconfidence that it is flat-out wrong; thesecond reaction will be horror that it maybe right; and the third will be reassurancethat it was obvious all along.

One of the things I admire most aboutISSSEEM is that it has a way of honoringits own. This is really important in this

strenuous, hazardous work that some of ushave bitten off. I want to do my bit byhonoring two people who have played ahuge role in my life. One of the finesthealers Ive ever known was CharlotteCharlie Maguire, whose guiding principlein her life, as she put it, is that love is the



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essence of healing. Back in 1981, Charliewas was Ms. Corporate America. She wasthe Vice President, Director of Patient Carefor nineteen major hospitals in Texas. Butin 1981, she had the guts to say I quit.

She walked away from the corporate worldwith the gentle nudging of Norm Shealy,who had been one of the co-founders of theAmerican Holistic Medical Association. SoCharlotte founded the American HolisticNurses Association, which today has grownto 4,000 members, and is a major championfor healing in the world. This organizationhas matured so greatly that The American

Nurses Association has officially recognizedholistic nursing as a subspecialty withinnursing. Thats a big deal.

Last April 22, my wife Barbie and Ijourneyed up to Charlottes Buffalo WomanRanch, which is outside the little town ofDove Creek in southwestern Colorado. We

went to see her for the last time; she wasdying from metastatic breast cancer. She

was in terrible shapeshe was totally bald,she was battered, beat up, tiredandbeautiful. We all knew that this would beour last time to see each other. She and my

wife have always been able to have a heart-to-heart conversation, so they got right withit. Barbie asked her, Charlie, have you seenthe other side? She nodded yes, and Barbiesaid, Whats it like? She said, Its

beautifulit is so beautiful. Then sheadded, I cant wait, Barbie, for you andLarry to join me there. I said, Charlie,not so fast! There are some things thatshould not be rushed. A few days later shedied in perfect peace.

I want also to bow deeply to someone Ivealready mentioned many times: ElisabethTarg. I learned so much from Elisabeth; she

was one of the greatest healers Ive ever

known. She died two years ago from aglioblastoma. Elisabeth had the distinctionof being one of those people who can turnout a positive healing study. She did itlargely because she was healing; sheembodied healing. From her sickbed, shetold us just before she died, What I want


Charlotte McGuire1942-2008


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most is to return as the Virgin Marysassistant, so I can help people learn how tolove and to heal. So its to these tworemarkable women that I devote this session.

If theres a take home about this, keep inmind that were engaged in endeavors thatare sacred and precious. We ought tohandle them with all the care we can. Inorder to drive that home, I want to finish

with some images, and I will ask my friendShin Terayama to accompany these images

with music from his cello. These imagesremind me of the sacredness with which

people can connect with the world. Theseimages are called holding the sun images.If you Google holding the sun, you canfind most of them. Many of them are setto music on YouTube. The sun is a verypotent healing image. My friend Shindevised a ritual from the rooftop of hisapartment building in Tokyo when he wassuffering from metastatic renal cancer. He

would go up to the roof every morning andplay his cello while the sun was rising andshining its first rays on him. The cancer

went away. [Cello music plays . . .]

This paper is based on Larry Dosseys Address,presented at the Eighteenth Annual ISSSEEMConference, Energy, Intent, and Healing (June 19-26, 2008).

CORRESPONDENCE: Larry Dossey [email protected]

REFERENCES & NOTES1. W.B. Jonas & C.C. Crawford, Healing, Intention

and Energy Medicine (New York, NY: ChurchillLivingstone, 2003), pp. xv-xix.

2. R. Byrd, Positive therapeutic effects of intercessory

prayer in a coronary care unit population. SouthernMedical Journal81, 7 (1988), pp. 826-829.

3. W. Harris, M. Gowda, J.W. Kolb, C.P.Strychacz, J.L. Vacek, P.G. Jones, A. Forker, J.H.OKeefe & B.D. McCallister, Archives of InternalMedicine159, 19 (1999), pp. 2273-2278.

4. K.Y. Cha, M.D., D.P. Wirth & R. Lobo, Doesprayer influence the success of in vitro fertiliza-tion-embryo transfer? Report of a masked,randomized Trial, Journal ofReproductiveMedicine46, 9 (September 2001), pp. 781-787.

5. F. Sicher, E. Targ, D. Moore & H.S. Smith, Arandomized double-blind study of the effect ofdistant healing in a population with advancedAIDS report of a small-scale study, WesternJournal of Medicine169, 6 (1998), pp. 356-363.

6. M.W. Krucoff, S.W. Crater, C.L. Green, A.C.Maas, J.E. Seskevich, J.D. Lane, K.A. Loeffler,K. Morris, T.M. Bashore & H.G. Koenig,

Integrative noetic therapies as adjuncts topercutaneous intervention during unstablecoronary syndromes: Monitoring andActualization of Noetic Training (MANTRA)feasibility pilot, American Heart Journal142, 5(2001), pp. 760-767.

7. M.W. Krucoff, S.W. Crater, et al., Music, imagery,touch, and prayer as adjuncts to interventionalcardiac care: the Monitoring and Actualization ofNoetic Trainings (MANTRA II) randomized study,Lancet366 (2005), pp. 211-217.

8. H. Benson, et al., Study of the Therapeutic

Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiacbypass patients: A multicenter randomized trialof uncertainty and certainty of receiving interces-sory prayer, American Heart Journal151 (2006),pp. 934-942.

9. J. Achterberg, K. Cooke, T. Richards, L.Standish, L. Kozak, & J. Lake, Evidence forCorrelations between Distant Intentionality andBrain Function in Recipients: A FunctionalMagnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis, Journalof Alternative and Complementary Medicine 11, 6(2005), pp. 965-971.


healing research what we know and don't know; larry dossey (vol 19 no 1)

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