Positive Health Online

Larry Dossey is a medical doctor who is also an acknowledged authority about spiritual healing. This is a heavy-duty book, which offers at the same time highly serious content as well as compellingly compulsive reading.

In Reinventing Medicine, Larry Dossey provides an authoritative history documenting healing research (with a 25-page bibliography of references). He has an uncanny knack of telling in an extremely personable way, the amazing stories of people who recovered from certifiably impossible clinical conditions, describing the sorts of healing that sceptics might call 'miracles', spontaneous remission or even 'fraudulent' cases.

Like the account of one of the author's dreams, in which he dreamed prior to the event that the young son of a colleague was totally distraught and hysterical while undergoing an EEG test. On the following day, when the dream came true and he witnessed the very scene he had dreamed being played out in the hospital, and discussed it with the boy's father, this rather shook the fairly sceptical Larry Dossey.

Or the incredible story of the woman with MS so bad that she was confined to a wheelchair for many years, even having the tendons in her legs keeping her kneecaps in place surgically severed. Originally a nun who had to give up her religious vocation, she lost her religious faith; however, during a healing at a local church service, she experienced sensations in her legs. The next day, much to her and everyone else's astonishment, she was able to get out of her wheelchair and was fully fit and active. Her remarkable, impossible recovery was fully documented and confirmed by medical doctors. Even her bladder swollen to many times normal size and incontinent had returned to normal.

Dr Dossey argues the case for the evidence of nonlocal healing phenomenon persuasively; there are also hilarious anecdotes regarding the disastrous or 'miraculous' effects of certain individuals upon machinery – cars, buses, computers; we all know our equivalent anecdotes of 'Doctor Deaths' of machines who appear to cause systems to crash in their presence, or magical engineers who need only to walk into the room for computers to work again.

Larry Dossey divides the history of medicine into three eras: Era I: the period commencing from the 1860s, the beginning of 'scientific' or 'mechanical' medicine, in which mind is not a factor, but mind a result of brain mechanisms; Era II: following world war II to recently, the development of psychosomatic medicine, or Mind-body medicine, in which Mind is a major factor in healing within the individual; and Era III: we are in transition today to Nonlocal or Eternity Medicine, in which Mind is a factor in healing both within and between persons. Healing at a distance is possible.

Some of the most fascinating parts of this book concern the voluminous research which has been conducted into healing, much of it using prayer, much of it unknown to the human recipient, some of it with nonhuman life forms including bacteria, seeds, mice. This healing literature is highly regarded, it having been performed under the most rigorous of test designs – double-blind, randomized, etc.

Towards the end of the book Dr Dossey puts together a dramatic reconstruction of an Era III Emergency Room, using physicians, nurses and anonymous interdenominational praying participants from all over the world, hooked up by computer. The recipient, an accident victim, wears a bracelet directing that she be treated in an ERA III trauma room, with physicians who used, in addition to standard ERAs I and II approaches, also 'nonlocal' healing and touch techniques throughout the emergency room and hospital. This is very moving vision indeed.

This book is a must-read, especially if you are a sceptical type.