It’s the fascinating connection between science and spirituality - renowned physician Dr. Larry Dossey has dedicated his career to connecting the concepts of consciousness and healing after he started getting bouts of periodic blindness from his migraine headaches. Instead of relying soley on conventional medicine to heal, Dr. Dossey turned to the power of prayer. And what he discovered just might surprise you. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Senator Fulbright said, we must dare to think about unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops, and action becomes mindless.
Look, let's get over this intellectual indigestion and go with the data.
You know, we pride ourselves on being scientists.
That requires so often an uncommon amount of courage.
And if we're not willing to go there, then we have no right to represent ourselves as decent scientists.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Dr. Larry Dossey, known to many of you for all of his wonderful work on spirituality and healing.
He's got a most recent book, The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things, 14 Natural Steps to Health and Happiness.
Larry, thanks for joining us.
It's great to be here.
Thanks for inviting me.
So the reason we've got Larry here is he's part of six pioneers who won awards from the Bravewell Initiative.
And this Bravewell group has spent its time in trying to fast track the integration of medicine, integrative approaches to medicine with mainstream medicine.
And one of the ways you do that is to find the true heroes, the true pioneers who changed medicine by their very early work and then have stayed through it to watch the transformation occur.
And Larry definitely fits in that group.
It was no surprise to anybody that he was one of the awardees.
He passed his deeply rooted in traditional science as a physician, practicing in Dallas, Texas for many years, as a leader of a large medical group down there.
And after a very prominent career taking care of people in fairly traditional ways, he began slowly to get involved in some of the alternative approaches to healing people.
By the way, this is a gentleman who was on the Clinton Task Force for Healthcare Reform in 1993. He'd been members of NIH panels.
He'd served in the military.
You know, a great red-blooded American physician who began to see that there were some flaws in how we're taking care of each other and began to offer his insights on how that might be changed and culminated in a beautiful career.
Larry, in your presentation today, which is spectacular, at the Bravewell Retreat, you spoke beautifully of one of the first things that happened to you as you began to investigate integrative medicine.
And it was a personal health challenge that you were facing.
Yeah, I really had a big challenge.
It almost wrecked my career, Mamet, before I even got started.
This was a classical migraine headache, which by definition involves not just headache, but profound nausea, vomiting, incapacitation for 24, 36 hours.
But the worst thing for me was periodic blindness.
I would have these huge blind episodes and this became an ethical issue for me.
I thought it was just a matter of time until I would have one of these attacks when I was in a critical medical or surgical procedure and maybe kill somebody.
I actually tried to drop out of medical school because this became such an ethical issue for me.
And why didn't you?
Well, my mentor advised me against it.
He said, don't worry, Larry, you're taking this much too seriously.
He said, this always gets better.
Well, you know, it got worse.
It got a lot worse.
Long story short, and I'm happy to report that I stumbled upon a solution to this quite by accident.
In the early 70s, a technique called biofeedback emerged from the Menninger Foundation.
It was found that people who used biofeedback procedures with the imagery and visualization and learning to relax their bodies extremely deeply simply reported that if they had preexisting migraine, the migraine went away.
I chased all over the country in desperation learning how to master this technique.
And so for me, that was the solution.
I had a virtual 100% disappearance of those headaches for the first time since adolescence.
So, you began to use biofeedback in your practice.
Right.
And walk me through that process.
This is, again, the late 60s in Dallas, Texas, hardly a bastion of liberal thought.
Sounds kind of current to me.
Yeah.
I suspect there was a fair amount of resistance.
There was.
I would get odd looks.
My colleagues at the Dallas Diagnostic Association were so unfamiliar and suspicious with these consciousness-related techniques and therapies that they really wouldn't even come into the room where we had our biofeedback laboratory.
They were so nervous about it.
Basically, this involves the measurement of certain physiological processes in your body that you ordinarily are not aware of.
For example, the skin temperature of your hands, for example, the muscle tension on your brow or any other muscle area of the body.
You learn through imagery and visualization, through actual feedback from these instruments that are giving you these signals, how to change your body physiology.
Basically, you learn to turn off the autonomic nervous system.
As you do this, certain medical conditions get better.
For example, not just migraine headache, but hypertension can improve.
It's been extremely helpful in irritable bowel syndrome, or so-called spastic colon.
Things that we know are exacerbated and sometimes maybe primarily caused by stress, tension, and anxiety.
You know, people listening to this conversation today would probably think, how could you not have known that it was a good thing to relax or learn how to meditate?
But back in the 60s and 70s, this was not part of the culture.
It was just entering into the culture, particularly down in the place, down in the United States where I lived.
Well, you told an interesting story about having two customs agents, federal agents, enter into your office.
Right.
Well, these guys nearly scared me to death.
I had become certified in biofeedback.
I had established a biofeedback lab in our group of interns, one of the first in Texas, and I was merely teaching biofeedback to our patients.
And so one day there was a knock on the door, and these two burly, very serious men in black entered my office to flash their gold badges and It's sort of unnerving.
They told me that they had come to confiscate my biofeedback equipment.
These two guys didn't have a clue about what biofeedback was, but they had been told that these were sinister machines that made all these crazy claims about people being able to do things with their mind.
So they said, we don't have to confiscate them.
We can watch you beat them with a hammer, or you can set them on fire.
I mean, it was literally insane.
I love it.
What actually happened?
They confiscated my biofeedback equipment.
It disappeared under their arms down the hallway.
But the next day, I reordered other biofeedback equipment, which was made in America.
I think that was part of the deal.
These were made in Holland, which probably sent bells and whistles banging around at the customs offices.
But after I got the new equipment from an American source, I was back in business, and the feds never hassle me again.
Well, today we were speaking about you.
You're called the roving ambassador for finding the role of spirituality in hell.
You coined the phrase, the non-local mind.
And I think it was in Recovering the Soul, which was, in my opinion, one of the greatest books written by a physician about the healing field in this century.
And this concept of a non-local mind caught me.
I must say, I was inherently resistant to a religious terminology that might describe this process.
It's a weird idea anyway.
And I think that was a brilliant coup because it took away a lot of the biases we often had.
Walk us through what that means and how you came up with it.
Yeah, well, I think we're desperate now to find a new image of consciousness that can account for how consciousness simply behaves in not just real, ordinary life, but in controlled experiments.
You know, we have hundreds of studies now, just to give you one example, in which people can use their compassionate, empathic thoughts to affect a living system at a great distance.
There's no way that you can explain how this might happen if you hold onto the conventional idea that consciousness is confined to the brain and the body in the present moment.
You just can't do it.
So we're faced with either having to ignore a vast database or come up with another picture of consciousness.
Religious people for decades have called this larger version of consciousness something like the soul or the universal mind or something like this.
But I wanted to get a fresh term that sort of captured some of the principles of emerging science.
For example, in quantum mechanics, quantum physics, which does have a place for these long distant interactions between apparent separate entities, but which probably aren't separate in some larger sense.
And so I thought this term, non-local mind, might do the trick.
I talked to some famous physicists around the world.
I traveled to India and talked to leading physicists in that country who were grounded both in spiritual traditions and in modern science.
That was a very refreshing and inspiring experience for me, by the way.
I came back from that trip with India, resolved that this was the term I was going to go with.
And I'm happy to say that this term, non-local mind...
Which just simply suggests that consciousness is free in the world, in space and in time.
It's not localized specifically to the brain body.
It's not even confined to the present moment.
This is the term I decided to go with.
That term has been embraced by many consciousness researchers these days.
And so, non-local awareness, non-local mind, is common currency in consciousness research now.
It must...
It would be rewarding to you to see how we could take insights that had been generated really in New Age physics and apply it to the human healing process.
In physics, it's known that you can have two electrons influence each other, even if they're not together near each other, and there's no way you can imagine them influencing each other, but somehow they do.
That they do is incontestable.
They do influence each other.
It's been shown and replicated in studies around the world.
That is no longer in doubt.
And so this provides, I think, a fertile metaphor.
It may be just a metaphor, but nonetheless, it's a picture that helps us imagine how people who are distant and separate from each other may also interact.
We have to be careful because there's no firm evidence that you can explain what goes on between separated people in terms of interacting distant electrons.
But nonetheless, this provides a very fertile image for us to use in our further understanding.
Just start walking me through some of the data on the role of prayer or other types of non-local healing on the process of recovering from any illness.
Yeah.
Well, studies have been done where healers of various persuasions, some of them belong to specific religious traditions, some are definitely not religious.
Some are nurses, for example, who use techniques called Reiki or similar therapies.
Try to influence people at a distance, even though those people are unaware that this influence is being exerted.
These are randomized controlled studies.
There are always...
Control groups who are matched with experimental groups.
And there are 20 of these studies done by now, and they show in 11 of these studies that you can't explain the results according to chance.
The endpoints that have been examined, for example, are recovery from heart attack, days spent in the hospital from serious illnesses, the rate of...
AIDS associated illnesses in people with advanced AIDS. The fertility rate of women who are undergoing in vitro fertilization.
You compare a control group who isn't prayed for compared with a group And you just simply see how these people do.
I mean, this is not unlike how you would evaluate a new medication, for example.
The breakthrough came in 1988 when Dr. Randolph Byrd, who was a faculty cardiologist at the University of San Francisco School of Medicine in San Francisco General Hospital, looked at the ability of prayer to make a difference in patients in the coronary care unit who had undergone heart attack or serious chest pain.
And this was the study which really caught my eye.
It had never occurred to me that anybody in their right mind would try to test prayer like that.
I just thought you just believed in it or you didn't.
But he did and found statistically significant advantages for the group getting prayed for.
If I may say so, this seriously affected the way I practice medicine.
I looked at this study and I said, I've got patients in the coronary care unit all the time.
If this study is valid, And I'm not praying for them.
Well, what about that?
So you became a priest, right?
That's right.
I left medicine.
Well, some of the skeptics said, well, I should have left medicine, but I didn't.
I began to reorient the way I practiced medicine.
after spending several years looking at associated evidence, shedding light on this long-distance healing phenomenon, I decided to make prayer a routine part of my practice day.
So I would go into my office earlier every day, lock the door from the inside.
I developed a very satisfying personal ceremony where I would light incense, and I had several shamanic rattles that people had given me.
And I would shake my rattles and pray for my patients.
I made it fun.
And I did that until I stopped practicing medicine.
We're only just scratching the surface here.
We've got a lot more to discuss, so stay with us. - Speaking to Dr. Larry Dossi, he's a well-respected physician who began to experiment, both through illness that he had in his own life, but also working with his patients, on both through illness that he had in his own life, but also working with his patients, on some very different ways of And it took him down the path of the role of spirituality.
Larry, just define that for me.
Yeah, well, I have a very wide-open definition of spirituality.
As a matter of fact, it's so broad, it puts a lot of people off.
But I must say, for me, spirituality is just communication with the absolute.
I mean...
For some people that's just too general, but I think that people should be free to define what the absolute is.
For many people in this culture, it's the Christian God.
For others it may be Allah, it may be the Tao.
For some people it just may be a sense of universal beauty and order.
And also this term communication should be left, I think, for people to judge for themselves what it might look like.
It may be praying aloud.
It may be sitting in silence.
It may be actually doing nothing.
It just may be a state of awareness where one tries to communicate with all there is.
I think that if we narrow down spirituality too closely, we just are in danger of disenfranchising a lot of people for whom this is vastly different from culture to culture.
You think that medicine is getting re-spiritualized?
I have no question about it.
Let me give you an example of why I would say that.
Back in 93, when Healing Words, my book on Prayer, was published, of the 125 medical schools in the country, only three had any sort of coursework looking at the correlation between spirituality and health.
Currently, over 90 of the nation's 125 medical schools have formal courses exploring these connections.
I think this is a landmark development.
It's a clear indicator in my mind that spirituality, at long last, is returning to medicine.
Larry, we had a survey we did at the New York Presbyterian.
And granted, New York City's a little different from Dallas.
But I was intrigued by the results.
We ended up publishing them in one of our bigger journals.
And in the survey, we asked patients who were coming to see us for open-heart surgery about whether they actually thought that people were praying for them and whether that was an important part of their decision process.
And the majority actually said yes.
And then we said, are you talking to us about it?
And they said no.
And then we said, do you want to talk to us about it?
And the majority again said no.
And when we surveyed them individually afterwards, a lot of them said, you know, we think that it's a pretty good time to think about our communication and connection to the whole before we have open heart surgeries, life-threatening surgeries, probably not a bad idea to sort of figure some of these big questions out.
But we're not sure you're the right person to do it.
And they weren't saying to insult me.
They were actually questioning whether, A, I will take the time to do it, and B, would they become uncomfortable because I had beliefs that were different from theirs?
Because they could trust me to do my best as a doctor.
Maybe I'd be influenced if they're Buddhist and I'm Christian or something else.
And this raised questions for us within our practice about whether we should stick to solid medicine but incorporate pastoral services more aggressively.
How'd you resolve that?
You know, I've resolved it in my own thinking exactly along those lines.
I think that one of the most underutilized resources in modern hospitals is pastoral care and pastoral counseling.
And I don't think that we physicians need to be that person who meets the spiritual needs of our patients.
I think we should be sensitive to them and give our patients an opening to express the need for further spiritual counseling.
But we are never, I think, going to be able to embody the sensitivity and the skills, the consummate skills that some of the pastoral counselors and hospital chaplains embody, These guys have rigorous training programs.
And they're good at it.
They are really good at it.
We don't need to reinvent that wheel.
But I'll tell you where this is headed at a national level.
The so-called Joint Commission on Accreditation, which accredits the 19,000 hospitals and clinics in the country, has required since 1998...
That if you want to get your hospital accredited, you've got to have a vehicle in place in order to assess the spiritual needs of every patient that's admitted to your institution.
This is a requirement for accreditation.
And again, it isn't that...
If a patient expresses spiritual needs or wants spiritual counseling, they call for the guy in the white coat with a stethoscope around his neck.
I think this generally is a bad idea because we're just not skilled along those lines.
What they do is to call hospital chaplains or pastoral counselors.
I think that's the way to do it.
Walk me through intentionality.
What does that mean?
Intentionality is simply wanting, wishing, willing something to happen.
It is forming an intention and trying to embody a kind of mental energy to make that happen.
You know, philosophers have extraordinarily complicated ways of defining intentionality, but that's the street definition I can go with.
It works pretty well, I think, actually.
You can test it.
Maybe we've got data.
You spoke at the Braywell Conference beautifully about how reviewers of manuscripts you would submit would be fairly resistant, because the ideas you presented are pretty foreign to...
To Western-based scientists.
Yeah.
The thought that we have a non-local mind.
Right.
Maybe it's prayer or intentionality or whatever manifestation it takes.
It would be a bit surprising for a Western-minded physician to think it could make a difference.
And you quoted reviewers saying, you know what, even if this was true, I wouldn't believe it.
That's right.
How did you overcome that inherent bias in the system against the papers you were writing?
Well, not too gracefully, to tell you the truth.
I... I used to be very naive about this.
I used to be one of these people who thought that if we just had a, you know, a drop-dead, double-blind, randomized controlled study that plugged all the loopholes and we did enough of these that all the critics would come around and come over to our side.
It doesn't work that way in many areas of medicine and science in general.
I think the debate about non-local mind and distant intentionality in many ways is not a debate about the data.
We have compelling data, I think, for anyone who approaches this with an open mind.
There are other issues that come into play which affects people's attitudes.
Their own personal experiences, for example.
The worldview that they grow up with, which absolutely prohibits some of these things we've been talking about.
So it's not surprising to see scientists get their backs up and just dig in their heels and say, you know, as I mentioned, this is the sort of thing I wouldn't believe even if it were true.
I mean, that's a flagrant admission of bias and prejudice and dogmatism.
If I actually felt that, I wouldn't be saying that publicly, as this skeptic did.
I would be trying to conceal that, I think.
I wouldn't want people knowing that.
Subconsciously, many of us go into environments like that.
Any while, who was one of the pioneers with you and spoke, well, you were the two, these six partners were broken up into three groups of two, so you guys were paired, spoke to the same topic, which is the bias we have, and he called it scientific fundamentalism, which is no different from any kind of other fundamentalism.
and you think you know the answers.
And he made a point that I was curious about your feedback.
He said, you know, the more you control an experiment, the less applicable it is to the population.
Because, you know, you take out all the nuances that make it human and all of a sudden it only applies to laboratory animals.
And that's probably one of the biggest challenges any research in prayer is going to inherently have.
I think we see this often in prayer studies that try to follow the double-blind, randomized control study design.
You know, a lot of these studies, just as you say, they take prayer out of a social context and they bring it into the laboratory, the hospital, the clinic, and test it in a way in which nowhere in the world is prayer actually used like that.
For example, there was a recent Harvard study looking at prayer, and they had three groups, and they told two of the groups, look, you may or may not be prayed for.
Now, just stop a moment and imagine...
What that implies.
Right.
You set up ambiguity.
You'd start praying for yourself, wouldn't you?
Well, yes.
Now, that's an important point.
Yeah.
It's like, okay, well, I don't know if they're praying for me, so I'm going to pray for myself.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And so what you do in real life is you pray for someone unconditionally, absolutely without question.
If your mother's going to have bypass surgery anymore, you don't go to her tonight and say, Mom, I know you're having surgery tomorrow, but I just haven't decided whether I'm going to pray for you.
I'm not sure, Mom, which way this is going to go.
But that's what we do in randomized controlled trials.
We set up that ambiguity, and God knows what that does in terms of setting up internal psychological dynamics that you just have no way of controlling once you set up that study like that.
So I think the best way to test prayer, just to be very brief, is simply to use it like it's done in real life, where you have a group of people and you tell them, look, I'm praying for you, I love you, I feel compassion for you, I deeply care about how you do, and you're getting my prayer.
And then you see how they do with a group who you do not do that toward.
That's the way to do it.
It's not to use prayer as sort of a teaser where you say, well, we don't know if we're going to pray for you or not.
Well, there's another thing that that brings up, for me anyway, which is that if you're If you're measuring the success of prayer on whether or not the person gets better or not, you kind of think that this whole non-local mind is operating on a different playing field than we are.
So maybe the real healing is taking place on the spiritual level and has nothing to do with whether they get over their cancer or not.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Yes, of course I do.
And as a matter of fact, this is such a crucial issue for me personally.
When I prayed for my patients in my practice, I never prayed for a cancer to go away.
I just simply asked that the best outcome prevail here.
I may or may not know what that is.
I didn't feel comfortable dictating the terms to the universe.
About the outcome of this person's clinical status.
It may be in certain situations that the best outcome, the most compassionate outcome, is for that person to pass.
We all see situations like this.
So I don't feel comfortable dictating the terms to the world, to the universe, through specifying prayer outcomes.
I just simply pray, may the best thing happen, may the best outcome prevail, or as some people would put it, may thy will be done.
But that's going to happen anyway, isn't it?
You are so intuitive.
Well, you can't really manipulate the universe.
You can't say, you know, please, please, please.
If I say the 37th please, then it'll happen.
How do you deal with that?
Well, people certainly do try to manipulate the universe.
I've actually had devotees, advocates of prayer, to accuse me of just...
Being too cowardly, they would say, Larry, you don't have enough confidence in prayer.
If you did, you'd pray for something specific and risk being wrong.
They say, this way of praying, may the best thing happen.
It's just too mushy.
They say, you're just trying to weenie out of your prayer not working.
So, you know, these conversations go in a million different directions sometimes.
I think your point is really great.
Now, when you pray in one of these double-blind studies for prayer, The best thing to happen, and people do statistically get better.
How do you explain that?
I don't know.
This is universal mystery for me.
I don't know why people get better.
If you think energetically, you're certainly not going to change God, whatever you want to call it, God, the divine, the universe, by praying.
He, she, it is not going to change because you're talking.
But you could change as a person.
You could open yourself up.
It's like, you know, you have a glass upside down and the water's constantly pouring, but when you turn it upside right, then you're able to...
So I think it's more a function of how prayer affects us than how it affects the universe.
I agree.
Okay.
I agree.
We're on the same page, I think.
You know, Lisa's a Reiki master.
So one of the questions I was going to ask you, which brings us to, is what are the differences between prayer, which has a deity often linked to it, almost always, and energy work like therapeutic touch or Reiki or others that don't actually call upon a personified being, but more tap into the energy that's out there and perceived.
Well, I've been talking to Americans about how we think about prayer for many years, and one of the things I've done, I've had the opportunity to interview hundreds of Reiki practitioners, and I ask them, do you think that there's anything similar to what you do in Reiki to what I've been talking about with prayer and healing intentions?
And almost all of them say, well, of course there is.
Of course they look at me like I'm crazy for even asking the questions sometimes.
I think there is a crossover between many of these ancient healing methods.
And also, I would add about the issue of a deity.
You know, Buddhism is one of the religions in the world where prayer is really precious to practitioners.
But Buddhism is not a theistic religion.
They don't have the idea of a personal God, as we do in the Christian West.
And so, Buddhist prayer apparently works as well as any other kind when you put it to the test in some of these studies.
So I think we can say from that that a deity, a prayer to a deity, it looks optional.
When we come back with Dr. Larry Dawson, we'll speak a little bit more about the extraordinary healing power of ordinary things.
Larry, in the Braywell Collaborative, you ended your discussion with a very beautiful quote read from this floor of the U.S. Senate.
Well, one of my heroes in life is Senator J.W. Fulbright, who was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee when he was in the Senate.
And he said something on the floor of the Senate on March 27, 1964, which has always inspired me.
He was talking about having the courage to follow new information, actually, wherever it may lead us.
This is what I wanted to challenge the Brave Will attendees to do with respect to some of this outrageous stuff about non-local mind.
And so Senator Fulbright said, we must dare to think unthinkable thoughts.
We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world.
We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent.
We must dare to think about unthinkable things.
Because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.
So that's what I've been trying to promote in my peregrinations around the country to medical schools and hospitals.
Look, let's get over this intellectual indigestion and go with the data.
You know, we pride ourselves on being scientists and That requires often an uncommon amount of courage.
And if we're not willing to go there, then we have no right to represent ourselves as decent scientists.
Speaking of data, it gets progressively more difficult as you enter into realms where people can argue that you didn't give the therapy.
You know, you do an experiment on a pill.
You got the pill, you didn't get the pill.
Yeah, they might absorb it differently, but you pretty much know they got it.
Many would argue that what you're really talking about is love.
And energy is a manifestation of that love.
How do you measure that?
How do you actually begin to figure out how this plays in the healing of the human body?
Well, it raises one of the great questions.
What is this...
We don't even know if the term force is applicable or not.
What is this energy that seems to affect someone when a distant individual experiences empathy and compassion and concern and love for them?
This really centers on a great debate in healing research.
Some people talk about subtle energy going between the prayer and the subject.
The problem with that line of thing is that nobody's been able to figure out how to register any kind of energy, how to measure anything that could be called energy in terms of modern physics.
There are four known types of energy in modern physics.
Gravitational force, electromagnetism, and something called the weak and strong nuclear forces.
All of these make meters move in one direction or Geiger counters go off.
The problem with calling this energy and the healing transaction is that no one can measure anything at a distance.
I'm talking about people being on the other side of the earth from being separated by global distances.
It blows your mind.
It really does blow your mind.
That's why I think we're going to have to find more elegant, specific terms.
I don't know what the term might be.
That might go beyond energy and get us away from sort of an energy dialogue.
The thing is that the term energy has entered so solidly into the dialogue about healing that it may be impossible to dislodge it.
Actually, I hope not.
Because of several reasons.
First of all, we know that healing does not get weaker the farther you are away from the healer.
All known forms of energy do dissipate.
So we know from the get-go that energy is not the perfect term for whatever this healing stuff is.
You know, we don't have a proper term for this.
I've just, you know, tongue-in-cheek suggested that we call it factor X and just not try to define it with improper metaphors.
I don't know what we'll wind up calling it, but so far, non-locality seems to be the concept that's going to get us there.
Because you know, you were talking about those distant particles a moment ago, which although they appear separate, when you change one, the other one changes instantly and to the same degree.
No force, no energy is transmitted between those particles.
That's part of the concept of non-locality.
I think that we're talking about a concept in healing which goes beyond force and beyond the traditional concept of energy.
I'm pretty alone in that, by the way.
I don't know.
You've gotten the attention of a lot of very wise people who are saying, you know, there's something else out there.
We can't quantitate it.
It's not as straight up as the things we've been trying to do to help people get better, but that's where the power may actually lie.
And it certainly does broaden that vista, the healing vista that we often seek as physicians, nurses, and other members of the healing profession.
Now, you mentioned the concept of love.
I think it's important to dwell on that for just a moment, because we know that if you remove love from these healing situations, if you take away this feeling of compassion, these studies just flop.
They will not work.
And so love seems to be an indispensable element.
Call it empathy or compassion or just good bedside manner.
You know, we've got a million terms for this.
But if you take this away, these healing experiments usually do not work at all.
We're speaking with Larry Dossier today, his most recent book, The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things, 14 Natural Steps to Health and Happiness.
Let's talk about some of these steps.
First of all, you startled me in the optimism chapter, which is the first one, where you actually quote the percentage of physicians who are pessimistic and depressed.
Oh.
And the suicide rates, just to give you a number so you don't have to memorize them, male physicians kill themselves 1.4 times more than non-physician males.
That's a 40% increase in suicide.
Female physicians kill themselves 2.2 times more often.
That's a 220% increase in the chance you're killing yourself.
So should I tell my daughters not to become physicians?
You know what I tell these kids?
Become a doctor if you must.
And I think that is wise because it suggests that there's a calling.
If you're called to it, you better not resist it.
You better do it.
Oh, I love that.
That's great.
Become a doctor if you must.
Yeah, you quote Thomas Merton in the second chapter, which I'm forgetting, and that's a wonderful writer who's quoted often by Richard Rohr, who's...
A Catholic theologian that Lisa and I are huge fans of.
He's been on the show several times.
And the quote was, if I'm going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten.
Yeah.
What did he mean?
Well, let me give you an example about our experience as young doctors.
When I was in medical school, our professors told us that we want you to memorize everything we dish out to you, but within five years, 90% of it will be obsolete.
God help you if you hang on to that and don't forget that worthless stuff.
There's a case to be made in our lives for forgetting.
One of my favorite Buddhist writers was the philosopher Alan Watts.
And Watts said that forgetting is so important for human beings that he wants to establish a faculty that he would call not memory, but its opposite, which he called forgettery.
So...
And I think this is important because, you know, there's just an obsession now in the culture about age-related decline and forgetfulness and all of this.
And many of us, when we can't find our car keys or our glasses, we think this is the first sign of Alzheimer's disease.
And, you know, there goes memory.
And I think we ought to lighten up about this.
Most of this is quite normal.
We give ourselves credit for the things that...
We blame ourselves for the things we forget.
We seldom credit ourselves for the things we remember.
One of the chapters spoke about tears, which in the chapter you beautifully describe how in the Iliad, in the oral tradition of ancient Greece...
There was continuous crying by the heroes.
Ulysses cries in every single chapter.
And, you know, we turn that upside down in our culture.
You know, we say, you know, real men don't cry.
Well, in the Iliad, real men do cry.
It takes a real man to cry.
Tears have sort of erupted on the medical scene as an insight to chronic illness.
For example, there was a study out of Tokyo in which researchers took patients with rheumatoid arthritis.
And they showed them pictures, photographs that were very evocative emotionally.
As it turns out, the people with rheumatoid disease who could permit themselves to cry...
Had better immune markers in their blood, lower inflammatory rates, and over the course of the next year, a quieting of the hot joints associated with rheumatoid arthritis.
They did better clinically if they could permit themselves to cry when compared to the group that just could not permit themselves to cry in response to these emotionally evocative images.
For these people, the body really loved crying, and it responded with the remission of the rheumatoid arthritis.
As far as I know, this is the first disease which this tear connection has been investigated.
My hunch is that as we look at the health value of tearing and crying, we'll see this expressed in more diseases than rheumatoid arthritis.
Well, Yoshi, specifically in the book, quote, changes in interleukin-6, levels of some of the cells that protect us in our immune system.
CD4, CD8. Exactly.
Natural killer cells.
Sure.
Huge shifts.
I mean, we don't have drugs that can do this on purpose.
And the fact that folks who have difficulty releasing themselves so they can't cry would have changes in these levels is rewarding to all the moms out there who think it's important, but it's startling for medical professionals.
You talk a little bit about dirt.
Why is dirt back?
Dirt's back.
Big time.
Well, we've made a fetish out of hygiene.
I think we've gone overboard.
You can't walk down the aisles of supermarkets without being deluged with antibacterial substances and everything from toothpaste to the stuff under the sink and cutting boards and plastics are impregnated with it.
It's everywhere.
If we look at how children do with their immune response and correlate that with whether they've been reared in hygienic environments or not, you see some interesting things.
We know that if children are reared in dirty environments, for example, kids on the farm who get dirty on a daily basis, they have a lower instance of childhood asthma, infections, allergies, and eczema.
They have a much more robust and active immune system And the thinking is, according to something that's being called the hygiene hypothesis, is that kids need exposure to dirt, not because of the dirt, but because of the bacteria, fungi, viruses that are in the dirt that challenge their immune system as they're growing up at critical moments in their life.
And so the best way to paralyze the immune system in these children is to just keep them clean all the time as they're growing up.
This horrifies a lot of young moms, I know.
Not me.
That gets Oliver off the hook.
I'm not an overly clean mother.
Well, you know, we see the same thing in children who are raised in daycare.
They do better as they grow older, lower instance of asthma infections and so on.
Is that right?
I didn't know that.
Oh, yes.
So this may come as consolation to young moms who, you know, have a little guilt about parking their kids in daycare.
They're getting a huge benefit in terms of stimulation of the immune system by, you know, being exposed in daycare to this stew of...
Germs that these kids in daycare typically share on a daily basis.
I'll share a little secret with you.
My father, my parents are Turkish.
What he would do when the children were newly born, he would spit in their mouths.
And at least he threatened to do that.
I never actually witnessed it.
I did.
Turkish inoculation.
But as you know, the child gets many of its early immune system supports from the mother's breast milk, but more importantly, they get a lot of the bacteria to colonize their gut from the areola, from the tissue around the nipple, which is contaminated.
All of our skin is contaminated.
So it's sort of intriguing.
Well, you know, I'm not coming out publicly endorsing the Turkish.
Nor am I. Well, good.
But I would endorse the idea that we might re-evaluate some of the old childhood practices that did associate kids purposefully with dirt, for example, playing in sand piles.
It used to be so common.
And now, you know, it seems to be a dying custom.
Also making mud pies.
Do you remember?
Yes, I made mud pies.
Oh, that was fun.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, having pets is supposed to be good also, right?
That's right.
That's right.
Pets can be a surrogate.
They go play in the dirt outside.
They come in at night.
And lick you.
The kids play with the dogs, you know, and all of this.
So that's a way to have an exposure.
It's natural dirt.
Larry Dawson, let's end up with music.
You seem like a very musical person.
What role does music play?
Well, music is much too powerful to be regarded as mere entertainment.
I had fun in this chapter on music.
I collected some healing stories, which just really sort of knock your socks off.
And my favorite have to do with people who are in neurological intensive care units.
And then they're exposed to certain kinds of music and they miraculously wake up.
There are about 12 different cases now where people are in coma in neurointensive care units.
Christmas rolls around.
The carolers come in the hospital, as they often do, and they sing Christmas carols and people who are in very deep coma.
Who have been comatose for weeks to months.
Have been known now, on exposure to the Christmas carol, to start pulling out their IV tubes, extubating themselves, and waking up.
I have directions to my wife if I go into a...
I get involved in a car ride, get hauled off to the ICU, that she'd go get some Christmas carolers and come in and sing to me.
Actually, there's a lot of theorizing about what's going on here.
The thinking is that the hearing ability doesn't go totally away in people, even often in deep coma.
And we build up such deep, personal, fulfilling, pleasurable memories as children toward Christmas carols and certain seasonal things like that, that The music associated with that has the power to stir us deeply when we may be in coma.
This is an area, really, that needs to be investigated.
This is extraordinarily important in healing, I think.
Larry Dosta, your book, The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things, goes on to talk about plants and bugs, voices, mystery, and, of course, miracles.
And having you today with us has been a real miracle.
