“One night, following a lecture I gave on health and healing, a woman came forward to speak to me. Clearly shy, she had held back until the auditorium was almost empty. Looking around to make sure no one else was listening, she said almost in a whisper that thirty years ago she had been diagnosed with metastatic cancer. What did she do to get rid of it? Nothing, she revealed. She went on to say that nobody wanted to hear her story’ that people like her never get interviewed on “Oprah” or “Donahue,” which seem interested only in those dramatic cases where people do heroic, colorful things.
“She is right. Almost all the books that have emerged in recent years on the subject describe how to “beat” cancer with aggressive actions of an astonishing variety. Discussing the role of prayerfulness and “doing nothing” is about as enticing as announcing on the ten o’clock news that all the planes landed safely today at LaGuardia or O’Hare. This is unfortunate, because there is increasing evidence that prayerfulness can save lives.
“Prayerfulness–not the world-manipulating, disease-bashing forms of prayer to which most Westerners react when sick–permeates many cases of profound illness that improve spontaneously. Prayerfulness allows us to reach a place of experience where illness can be experienced as a natural part of life, and where its acceptance transcends passivity. if the disease disappears, we are grateful; if it remains, that too is reason for gratitude.”
“My present purpose is not to vaunt a new remedy but to state a fact–that cancer, even when advanced in degree and of long duration, may be better, and does sometimes get well. There is cure of cancer, apart from operative removal . . . . These cases . . . . are the sun of our hope.”
–Sir Alfred Pearce Gould (1910)
Healing Words
by Larry Dossey
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.
(Goodreads.com)