Dossey, Larry

Healing Words

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.

The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things: Fourteen Natural Steps to Health and Happiness

Every day modern medicine announces the arrival of yet another “wonder drug” or “miracle procedure” to a world increasingly wary of expensive high-tech cures. Drugs, transplants, and surgery don’t work for 90 percent of our aches and pains and, while we are grateful for life-saving developments, we know that most come with risks that we ignore at our peril.

Long hailed as one of the founding fathers of mind-body medicine, Larry Dossey directs our attention to simple sources of healing that have been available for centuries—treasures often hidden in plain sight—from the power of optimism and of tears to speed recovery to the surprising usefulness of dirt and bugs in curing disease and infection to the benefits of doing nothing.

Exploring the medical research that validates these simple remedies, Dossey encourages us to align ourselves with the wisdom of nature and allow true healing to take place. The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things can transform our view of what health is all about, whether our concern is cancer or the common cold.


From the Hardcover edition.

The Energy of Prayer: How to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice

Prayers for Healing: 365 Blessings, Poems, & Meditations from Around the World

In times of sickness or adversity, humans tend to seek comfort and healing from a greater power. We know this quest as prayer; universally it has brought solace and healing to many seekers. For those who lack the words, inspiration, or familiarity with prayer, Maggie Oman has assembled a collection of healing prayers for every day of the year. Included are voices as familiar as Duke Ellington ("Every man prays in his own language, and there is no language that God does not understand."), Bobby McFerrin, and May Sarton, along with voices as reverent as the Chinook Indians, Kahlil Gibran, and Mother Teresa.

As recent scientific research shows, the simple act of praying can be emotionally, spiritually, and even physically healing. With Prayers for Healing, Maggie Oman invites readers into a healing space that can transform both mind and body. Organized in daybook form, the book focuses on healing in all its dimensions - physical, emotional, interpersonal, social, and environmental. Quotations range from sources such as the Bible, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran, the Torah, and Native American texts, as well as from Deepak Chopra, Rumi, Martin Luther King Jr., Marianne Williamson, and others. Together they create a tapestry of comfort and inspiration for rejuvenation and renewal.

Prayer Is Good Medicine: How to Reap the Healing Benefits of Prayer

Since Larry Dossey wrote his first book, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine, he has toured the world meeting with audiences as diverse as Pentagon employees, church groups, and the British parliament. Regardless of the audience, Dossey noticed that most everyone seems interested in four general discussions: the scientific evidence for prayer, the controversies associated with prayer experiments, what prayer is, and how to pray. Prayer Is Good Medicine divides these discussions into four neatly contained sections. As prayer moves into the center stage of Western medicine Prayer Is Good Medicine acts as a modern-day prayer book as well as an ethical touchstone for healers and seekers.

Physician Larry Dossey - one of today's foremost authority and most highly sought-after speaker on the relationship between prayer and healing - offers practical methods and illuminating explorations of the what, where, how, and why of the power of prayer to affect our health. Putting aside confounding scientific jargon. Dossey employs his trademark style of informed and warmly anecdotal writing to examine people's hopes and expectations of prayer, as well as their anxieties and misconceptions. For readers who want to understand the spiritual dimension of health and healing. Dossey has created an invaluable and inspiring resource.

Reinventing Medicine: Beyond Mind-Body to a New Era of Healing

Cue the theme song to the Twilight Zone: Research shows your plants won't grow as well when you're depressed as when you're happy. Praying for someone else will improve your own health, too. The growth of E. coli bacteria is inhibited when a group of people merely think about stopping the growth. And qi gong practitioners in San Francisco can kill cancer cells in other peoples' bodies--by willing the cells to die. These ideas surely sound ludicrous, but these and other similarly mindboggling studies have been commissioned and replicated by researchers at Harvard, Duke, McGill, and other esteemed universities.

Larry Dossey is known as the father of mind-body medicine and perhaps best known for his advocacy of the role of prayer in healing in 1995's bestselling Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine. He admits that working on such seemingly impossible projects a few years ago would have ruined a researcher's career with "ATF," or "the anti-tenure factor." But things are changing. He wrote Reinventing Medicine to present proof that "the mind can literally change the external world" and how this "nonlocal mind" will change health care in the future. His argument for the existence of this nonlocal mind is as convincing as it is eloquently conveyed. Doubters, he says, merely need to examine their own dreams for proof this is true. When was the last time you had a conversation or found yourself in a situation you dreamed about the night before? Studies from as early as the 1960s "strongly suggest that dreams are an avenue of nonlocal communication between separate, distant persons."

Dossey's support of the nonlocal mind is sure to draw pooh-poohs from cynics, including M.D.s, but, he warns, health-care workers are bound to experience this force firsthand: "Doctors can experience their patients' symptoms nonlocally, and this can be unpleasant." He cites the example of psychiatrist Mona Lisa Shulz, a medical intuitive, who "began to grow increasingly uncomfortable, feeling hot and flushed," while speaking over the phone with a feverish patient. Dossey says this telesomatic event, extreme empathy, or whatever you want to call it, is dangerous, but that "empathic balance" is something that will be taught in medical schools in the future to ensure accurate diagnoses of ill patients. Dossey was one of the first vanguards of mind-body medicine, which is basically accepted as fact today; he's again presenting the future of medicine, as otherworldly as it seems. --Erica Jorgensen

Larry Dossey forever changed our understanding of the healing process with his phenomenal New York Times bestseller, Healing Words. Now the man considered on of the pioneers of mind/body medicine provides the scientific and medical proof that the spiritual dimension works in therapeutic treatment, exploding the boundaries of the healing arts with his most powerful book yet.

Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Approach

A physician and leading reformer of medicine delves into the compelling medical, scientific, and spiritual evidence for a universal consciousness and presents convincing evidence for a nonlocalized, holistic view of the mind and reality that accounts for even transcendental experiences.

Coyote Healing: Miracles in Native Medicine

Distills the basic principles used by Native American healers to create miracles.

• Explores the power of miracles in both traditional Native American healing and modern scientific medicine.

• Cites numerous cases in which people whose conditions were deemed hopeless were miraculously healed.

• Enables readers to start their own healing journey through the exploration of purpose, meaning, and acceptance.

• By the author of Coyote Medicine.

Native American healers expect miracles and prepare in all possible ways for them to occur. In modern medicine, miraculous recoveries are discarded from studies as anomalous cases that will taint the otherwise orderly results. Yet this small group of "miracle" patients has much to teach us about healing and survival.

Coyote Healing distills the common elements in miracle cures to help people start their own healing journey. Looking at 100 cases of individuals who experienced miracle cures, Dr. Mehl-Madrona found the same preconditions that Native American healers know are necessary in order for miracles to occur. The author reveals what he learned from both his own practice and the interviews he conducted with survivors about the common features of their path back to wellness. Survivors found purpose and meaning in their life-threatening illness; peaceful acceptance was key to their healing. Coyote Healing also tells of another kind of miracle--finding faith, hope, and serenity even when a cure seems impossible.

Be Careful What You Pray For...You Just Might Get It

Dr. Larry Dossey, the nation's foremost authority on prayer in medicine, warns that just as prayer can be used to positively affect health and healing, it can also be used for negative and destructive means. Through remarkable true stories, case histories, and scientific analysis, Dossey explores the nature of `toxic' prayer and teaches us how we can protect ourselves from its threatening influence.

Healing Beyond the Body: Medicine and the Infinite Reach of the Mind

Here is a new collection of writings on health and healing from a leader in the field of alternative medicine. Larry Dossey has transformed both the practice and teaching of modern medicine by demanding that they encompass two subjects that many in the scientific establishment would rather ignore. The first is meaning, a concept many scientists flatly declare to be beyond the realm of science. The second is nonlocality, a term indicating the infinite reach of human consciousness, or, more prosaically, the ability of one being to affect another—through prayer, for example—at a distance and through no known medium. A third concept connects and embodies both meaning and nonlocality: mind. It's a subject that Dossey quickly persuades us we know far too little about. Dossey is one of the most influential spokespersons for the role of consciousness and spirituality in modern medicine, lecturing to hospitals, medical schools, and lay groups around the world. The wide-ranging essays gathered in Healing beyond the Body exemplify consciousness without boundaries. Time and again, Dossey explores research that demands that we expand our view of healing to include elements well outside the standard medical modalities. He examines alternatives such as prayer, love, laughter, creativity, dreams, hypnosis, and more. Some of the essays are lighthearted and whimsical, such as those dealing with the impact of humor or fishing on health. Others are more challenging—for example, the essay on the "evil eye" and his Maggie Award-winning "War: A Vietnam Memoir." Some are visionary, such as those dealing with the infinite reach of the mind, and some are genuinely inspirational, such as the concluding essay, "Immortality." Each essay in its own way will challenge and inspire readers to examine themselves and their health in new and different lights.