Larry Dossey, MD: Tapping the Unconscious to Realize Intention

Larry Dossey, MD, is the author of 13 books on the role of consciousness and spirituality in health. His most recent book, ONE MIND: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters,¹ shows that our consciousness is nonlocally infinite, immortal, and one with all other minds.

Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal (IMCJ): At the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine, or AIHM, conference, your presentation will cover consciousness, spirituality, and spontaneous healing. What common thread runs through those concepts?

Dr Dossey: The keyword and the thread that run through 13 published books is consciousness. My career has been spent in internal medicine, and through those years, I have observed many cases that cannot be explained by just confining one’s attention to the material workings of the body. There have been collections of similar cases in books over the years. They cry out for some other sort of explanation. I have become increasingly fascinated by what else might be going on besides the material workings of the body.

For example, I recently came across a case of a young woman who was dying from multiple sclerosis and was confined to hospice. She was curled up in a fetal position, had a tracheostomy, a feeding tube in her stomach, couldn’t walk, was legally blind, hadn’t stood on her own legs in years, and had a “do not resuscitate” order. In the presence of a couple of her girlfriends who were in the room, she says she heard a voice saying, “Rise up and walk.” She did.

She was not expected to live beyond a week. This was basically a death watch. Her recovery occurred when local radio station in this small town requested prayers from the listening audience, not only for her but also for everybody else in the community who was seriously ill.

She got up and for the first time in many years and stood on her own. Her vision returned. She removed her oxygen. Her mother heard the ruckus in the room, went in, and looked her over. Apparently her body had changed. The mother said, “You’ve got muscles again!” Her father also came in, looked at her, and couldn’t believe it. He hugged her and, according to the write-up, waltzed her around the room.

She was previously religious but had lost her faith. That night, the whole family returned to the little church. This young woman walked from the back of the church, through the central aisle, up to the front of the auditorium. Everybody was aghast; they couldn’t believe it. The minister didn’t handle this very well. He fell against the podium for support and kept muttering, “This is nice, this is very nice.”

She went to her internist the next day. Nobody in the office could believe what they were witnessing. They sent her for a chest X-ray. Her lungs had re-expanded to normal and the infiltrates in her chest had disappeared. Long story short, she got well. She married and dedicated her life to helping other people. Her story is written up in a fabulous book that looks at these sorts of spontaneous healings. It’s called Physicians’ Untold Stories² and it’s written by an internal medicine doctor in the Wheaton, Illinois, area.

This sort of thing gets swept under the carpet in medicine. Although these cases are certainly not common, neither are they rare. The book Spontaneous Remissions,³ published by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, contains around 3000 of these cases, selected from about 100 languages reported in scientific journals around the world. If you are curious about cases of this sort, it’s certainly not difficult to find them. These cases beg for an explanation, and is the sort of thing I’m going to talk about at the conference.

Many of these cases involve spiritual and religious issues, as the case I just mentioned. The young woman interpreted the voice she heard as the voice of God commanding her to get up and walk. I should add that I don’t belong to any religious organization, so I am not promoting any particular religion in my discussion of these happenings.

These cases are tied together by consciousness—people’s thoughts, intentions, wishes, and prayers, including in many instances prayer from other people, as in this case.

IMCJ: Where is the link between consciousness and spontaneous healing? How does that play out?

Dr Dossey: I’ve written several books about the basic research in this field, and here’s what we know: You can take these phenomena into the lab and do experiments in both human and nonhumans, such as mice, rats, and even bacteria, in which people use their intentions, thoughts, will, and wishes to make biological changes in these living entities. Using controls, you can compare the effects of these healing efforts.

Working with nonhumans is interesting to me because they’re not subject to the placebo response and the effects of positive thinking. Scores of these experiments show that people can use their thoughts and intentions to modify biological aspects of these subjects. For example, around 10 replicated studies were done in academic institutions by William Bengston, PhD, who is an evolving sociologist in New York City, in which healers attempt to cure mammary cancer that has been transplanted into mice. If nothing is done, all the mice die within 30 days. With healing intentions, most of the treated mice are cured.

Bengston was taught when he was a young man how to do this. These are replicated, controlled studies. They are some of the most dramatic healing studies out there. He has actually taught skeptical college students, who don’t believe in any of this sort of thing, to achieve similar results. All told, this research meets the criteria for good science.

We’re beyond anecdote. The girl healed from nearly fatal multiple sclerosis is just a clinical anecdote, not a controlled study. But, in addition to single case reports, we do have many controlled studies. They are hugely important, not just in terms of clinical medicine and helping people get well, but in understanding our own minds.

Healing intentions appear to work at a distance. You don’t have to be in the same room or the same location as the subjects. A meta-analysis by British consciousness researcher Chris Roe, PhD, looked at hundreds of these experiments, not just in humans but also in the nonhuman situations, as I mentioned. He found positive results that exceeded what you’d expect by chance happenings.

IMCJ: How does the concept of intention contrast with spirituality?

Dr Dossey: It’s ambiguous. The reason I say that is because the healers are somewhat inconsistent in their explanations of how healing happens. Most of them say that they function as a kind of conduit between a higher power and what it is they’re trying to affect—a kind of go-between. But a smaller number of healers claim that they themselves are the source of the influence.

I think spirituality involves a sense of connectedness with a higher power, something that transcends the sense of self or ego. Spirituality can be a part of formal religion, but it often is not. A lot of healers describe themselves as deeply spiritual but have no affiliation with any formal religious structure whatsoever. On the other hand, many healers are deeply religious.

The scores of healing studies published so far find that healing is not confined to any particular religion; no religion has a monopoly on healing; nonreligious individuals can achieve results as well as religious persons. If I had to specify 1 trait that appears present in perhaps all healers, it is love—caring deeply for the object of one’s healing intention. I think loving intention is hugely important. And I believe it’s important to keep this domain as secular as we possibly can.

Bengston, who is a college professor and an extraordinary healer, considers his approach to be nonreligious. Neither is he particularly keen on bringing spirituality into it. He has a formal procedure that involves willing, wishing, and intending. He thinks a lot of his influence comes from the deep unconscious of the healer.

Bengston recruits college students to do the healing procedures in the laboratory on the mice transplanted with cancer. He selects nonbelieving, skeptical, nonreligious, agnostic students who have a stand-off attitude toward this stuff from the get-go. In spite of this—or because of it?—if they use the procedures and techniques that he instructs them in, they get formidable, positive results.

The results with these students seem to demonstrate that you don’t even have to believe in healing effects for their intentions to have a positive effect. This suggests to me that something deeply unconscious is happening here. I happen to be fascinated by that. I think it should be emphasized more than it is. It simply points to the mystery of what consciousness is, how it operates in human beings, and how it manifests in the world.

Carl Jung, the great psychologist, had a profound appreciation of the power of the deep unconscious that bypasses human awareness. I think we ought to pay attention to this concept if we hope to understand how healing happens.

IMCJ: There have been some studies that have examined the effects of gratitude on physiology. Can you speak to the role of gratitude in self-healing or self-promoting wellness in an individual?

Dr Dossey: Absolutely. I wrote a book once about optimism, a positive emotion not unlike gratitude. Optimism powerfully affects health outcome and can even be lifesaving. For example, following coronary bypass surgery, if people are optimistic about how they are going to do later on, their death rate is lower compared to people who have a negative, pessimistic attitude about what lies ahead.

Dr Dossey: So, although we often speak of the infinite, nonlocal factors in healing, for example, as when healing intentions operate at a distance, we should not neglect the local, here-and-now world of our emotional life as well.

IMCJ: What more will attendees at the AIHM conference take away from your presentation?

Dr Dossey: I want to impart to attendees an enthusiasm about their own consciousness and the power of their own ability to make a difference not just in their own lives but also in the world at large. The reason is that we face challenges as a species on this planet that we have not encountered before.

Our individual attitudes, decisions, and intentions are directly connected with whether or not we are going to have a future on this planet. These issues go far beyond individual health. How we view our own consciousness—whether it is limited and confined to us as individuals, destined for annihilation with physical death, or whether it’s part of a greater unified consciousness that is eternal and immortal—directly affects all life forms on the planet and whether we will survive in any meaningful way on this, the only home that we have.