Larry Dossey
Larry Dossey is a physician and author who propounds the importance for healing of prayer and spirituality. He combines science and prayer to advance the cause of healing the sick.
Larry Dossey studied medicine, graduating from University of Texas at Austin & the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas in 1967. While attending medical school, he became interested in Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Taoism. Severe, recurring migraines prompted him to study biofeedback and meditation in hopes of finding a means of controlling the headaches. He began to practice meditation regularly, while remaining skeptical about the type of praying he had learned in his youth. After graduation, Dossey went on to a distinguished medical career, which included service in Vietnam as a battalion surgeon and residencies at the Veterans Administration Hospital and Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Dossey's curiosity about the connections between science and religion prompted him to begin researching medical studies focused on the power of prayer to aid healing. In the 1980s, Dossey began writing books to document and explain his findings.
Dossey's 1993 book, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine, made it to the New York Times bestseller list and sold close to 150,000 copies in the first three years after its publication.
“I believe the vital ingredient is love—a state of caring and compassion that is so deep and genuine that the barriers we erect around the self are transcended.”
“Eventually it became clear that our emotions, attitudes, and thoughts profoundly affect our bodies, sometimes to the degree of life or death. Soon mind-body effects were recognized to have positive as well as negative impacts on the body. This realization came largely from research on the placebo effect—the beneficial results of suggestion, expectation, and positive thinking.”
“Become a good noticer. Pay attention to the feelings, hunches, and intuitions that flood your life each day. If you do, you will see that premonitions are not rare, but a natural part of our lives.”
“[Some scientific] experiments…tell us that what we consider the objective world depends in some measure on our own conscious processes. There is no fixed eternal reality……… true understanding is not to be achieved with the rational mind.”
“Our relatedness with other living forms provides us something we sorely need: a reverence for the life of all creatures great and small, and an expanded view of our place in nature–not as rulers over it, but as participants in it.”
“When our focus is toward a principle of relatedness and oneness, and away from fragmentation and isolation, health ensues”