Evidence of Prayer's Healing Power: A Sociological Perspective

Until relatively recently, prayer was a taboo topic to be avoided by the sophisticated and scholarly. Although survey researchers had long known that nearly nine out of ten Americans claim to pray, there was little curiosity about exactly what it is that prayers did and whether their activities made any difference. Some potential researchers contended that prayer, a privatized expression of religiosity, was impossible to study scientifically. Others, oblivious to the near universality of prayer as an expression of faith for Americans, simply ignored the topic. Even the media voyeurs skilled at probing the most intimate areas of human life had been silent about prayer. This seemed to be a strange fate for a practice that Friedrich Heiler, in his 1932 book Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion, called "the heart and center of all religion"!

Larry Dossey's Healing Words has done much to alert readers to the potentially healing power of prayer. His book, however, goes beyone simply reporting the findings by creatively offering tentative explanations within the context of a new paradigm. Dossey, cochair of the newly established Panel on Mind/Body Interventions of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, shares the latest evidence linking prayer, healing and medicine, while calling for a bold new integration of science and spirituality. What follows is a summary of this groundbreaking work and a critique developed through the eyes of a sociologist. The proffered critique is intended not as a negative criticism of this seminal work but rather as a commentary designed to stimulate further though on prayer and healing.

Dossey's investigation was launched by his discovery of a carefully controlled experimental study that indicated that prayer helped people get well. This study led Dossey to review other scientific literature in which he found "over one hundred experiments exhibiting the criteria of 'good science,' many conducted under stringent laboratory conditions, over half of which showed that prayer brings about significant changes in a variety of living beings" (p.xv). This vast body of literature had been largely ignored, Dossey asserted, because it does not fit with prevailing ideas. Indeed, the experimental studies and their support for the power of prayer caught even Dossey off guard: "Meditation was acceptable," he confessed, "but the thought of 'talking to God' in prayer was reminiscent of the fundamental Protestantism I felt I had laid to rest" (p. xvii). Dossey found, however, that he was unable "to ignore the evidence for prayer's effectiveness without feeling like a traitor to the scientific tradition.

In part 1 of his book, Dossey offers a descriptive framework for linking prayer and healing. In his attempt to understand the nature of prayer, Dossey makes a distinction between prayer and prayerfulness. The former takes many forms and is rooted in particular religious traditions. The latter is not conventional but is rather "a sense of simply being attuned or aligned with 'something higher'" (p. 24) — the Immortal, One Mind, described at length in Dossey's earlier work The Recovery of the Soul. It is prayerfulness, contends Dossey, "not the world-manipulating, disease-bashing forms of prayer to which most Westerners resort when sick," that facilitates healing. Prayerfulness brings with it acceptance and gratitude: "If the disease disappears, we are grateful; if it remains, that, too, is reason for gratitude." It entails a realization that "physical illness, no matter how painful or grotesque, is at some level of secondary importance in the total scheme of our existence" (p. 36).

Prayerfulness is a state that fits well into the emerging medical model discussed by Dossey as Era III medicine, an approach to science and medicine that is nonlocal and transpersonal. He designates as Era I physicalistic medicine, an approach emphasizing the effects of things on the body (acupuncture and homeopathy as well as drugs and surgery) that dominated from the 1860s to about 1950 and that is still influential. Era II medicine, which recognizes a mind-body connection, arose in the 1950s and is still developing. Although prayer may be linked to the Era II paradigm, Dossey includes all forms of distant healing and intercessory prayer for healing in the Era III model in which "effects of consciousness bridge between different persons."

The nonlocal or transpersonal medicine of Era III "cannot be described by classical concepts of space-time or matter'energy" (p. 41). It requires a whole new way of conceptualizing healing and the mind. According to the Era III model, the mind is a factor in healing not only within persons (as in Era II) but also between persons. Prayer, according to Dossey, is only one of several nonlocal mental phenomena relevant to healing. Some other related phenomena that have a similar nonlocal character are accounts of making medical diagnoses at a distance, noncontact therapeutic touch (healer's hands do not touch the person), transpersonal imagery (the consciousness of one person affects the physical substrate of another), mental communication at a distance, and telesomatic events (bodily changes affected by some distant cause). While Era II medicine posits a local mind active in the healing process, Era III medicine advances a mind that is "unconfined to points in space and time."

Dossey joins the call for a paradigm shift in modern medicine that would include recognition of interconnected consciousness. He believes that the conflict between science and spiritual realities exists because science has not been carried far enough. Moving beyond the Newtonian belief that the world is explainable by entirely local connections, Dosses describes the "new physics," positing nonlocal interactions that are unmediated, unmitigated and immediate. In characterizing space-time as nonlocal (rather than local), Era III medicine allows for the possibility of interactions between the nonmaterial and material. This new model thus allows for the possibility of prayer's having physical impact on persons and things.

In part 2, Dossey deduces specific factors that he feels influence the efficacy of prayer. One often-neglected possibility is the power of the unconscious mind in generating "dream prayer" — possibly "our most effective prayer." Dossey observes: "If the urge toward oneness, unity, and wholeness lies at the heart of prayer — and if this urge erupts consistently during dreams when the unconscious takes the stage — we must consider seriously that prayer and dreaming are very closely related, and that we pray unconsciously night after night, dream after dream" (p. 71). In discussing how to pray and what to pray for in conscious prayer, Dossey suggests taking the stance of a Jungian "introvert" and being more inner-directed and contemplative. On the basis of research conducted by the Spindrift organization, Dossey contends that both directed prayers (those attempting to steer the universe in a precise direction) and nondirected prayer (not telling the universe what to do) are effective methods. Measuring the impact of prayer on mold, bacteria and seed (the focus of Spindirft research), however, suggests that "the nondirected technique is quantitavely more effective, frequently yielding results thatwere twice as great, or more, when compared to the directed approach" (p. 97). Throughout this section of the book, Dossey attempts to demonstrate the nonlocal quality of prayer that transcends space and time as we know it. Much of this discussion relies on physicist Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality with its interpretation of Bell's theorem. The main thesis is, first, that not only are unmediated connections present in rare circumstances, but they may underlie the events of daily life; and, second, that it is possible that humans may be joined together in much the same nonlocal way that subatomic particles are connected.

After presenting the analytic framework and reviewing matters relevant to the efficacy of prayer, Dossey concludes his book with a discussion of the "evidence," that is, a systematic discussion of empirical studies of prayer and their impact on human and nonhuman life. He reports that all of the studies on human subjects, even the best, have been unable to meet the criteria of controlling variables required in experimental research. There are simply too many variables to hold constant — prayer strategies, skill at praying, differences among doctors, psychological coping mechanisms, and so forth — to know for certain that prayer makes a difference in human subjects. While some studies suggest strongly that prayer does make a difference, Dossey does not find any of them conclusive. Rather he finds the evidence he seeks on the power of prayer from research conducted on nonhuman subjects — mice and mold, bacteria and barley seeds. These studies have researched the effects of praying on fungi, yeast, bacteria, cancer cells, plants and animals, with at least half of them reporting statistically positive results.

There are many different perspectives for viewing reality, with perhaps the major cleavage being between what Immanuel Kant termed phenomena, the world we can experience with our senses, and noumena, a world that cannot be approached through empirical observation. Science can investigate the world of phenomena, but its empirical methods cannot tap the world of noumena. While science has tended to discount the world of noumena — a world of angels and demons, free will and a human soul — Dossey brilliantly attempts to demonstrate that this dichotomy may be a false one. Noumena and phenomena become one through the lenses of quantum theory, a framework the author uses to disucss empirical studies of that which is allegedly nonresearchable. His thesis is a credible one from the perspective of natural science, but can it have lost sight of the human dimension? By definition, noumena (which Kant claims are present together with phenomena in human beings) cannot be captured in the research laboratory (which may be why Dossey is more comfortable with the studies done on nonhumans than on humans).

What is eclipsed in Dossey's insightful analysis is the unique way people construct their social reality. Social reality is an ongoing production — not only is it produced by human actors, but it acts, in turn, on them. Social reality is not a static "thing" but a dynamic process. Even the seemingly objective reality of medicine is, in fact, socially constructed, differing from culture to culture and within cultures.

Human beings tend to take their own culture for granted, and Dossey is no exception. For example, he does not try to define illness but rather implies a taken-for-granted, almost commonsensical, understanding of the term. Sociologists, however, commonly distinguish disease, a biological disorder, from illness, the way persons experience disorder in a given social or cultural context. It is known that alternative healing practices (including prayer) often are used precisely where medical practices have been found ineffective, namely, in dealing with incurable disease and chronic illness.

There are many noteworthy differences as well as superficial similarities among shamanism, psychic healing, metaphysical practices, and Christian healing. Dossey's discussion minimizes the differences by grouping them all into a single paradigm. However, it may well be that one healing practice rests on an energy flow (Era I model), another is a product of the placebo effect (Era II0, and still another fits Dossey's thesis of nonlocal information flow (Era III). Before we can explain healing prayer, we need to have accurate descriptions of the process, particularly how illness and wellness are being socially constructed.

A similar problem of linguistics may be found with Dossey's use of the term prayer. Although he regards prayerfulness (a contemplative mode of praying with a disposition of resignation to the Absolute Mind) as the most effective form of prayer, the limited scientific evidence he presents comes from nonhuman experimentation. A cursory reading may lull the reader into thinking that scientists know more about prayer than they actually do. It has been only within the past few years that social scientists have gone beyond asking questions about the frequency of prayer to ascertaining major forms of prayer. Those who have been studying different types of prayer have come to recognize that prayer is indeed a multidimensional phenomenon, taking different forms and having different degrees of efficacy.

Within Dossey's allegedly scientific paradigm is a line of thinking that goes far beyond the world of phenomena accessible to the scientific method. It is a version of pantheism that posits a nonlocal human mind in union with a nonlocal One Mind, a position that requires as much faith as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. While this image of God may be tenable to intellectuals who struggle (as does Dossey) against earlier socialization into more traditional forms of Judaism or Christianity, it is sociologically significant that this view is held by only a very small percentage of Americans. (According to Gallup Poll findings, 84 percent of Americans believe God is a "heavenly father who can be reached by prayers," in contrast to 7 percent who regard God as either an "impersonal creator" or an "idea, not a being.") The overwhelming majority of Americans conceptualize God as someone with whom they can have a personal relationship. The way this relationship is socially defined, according to social psychological thought, could, in itself, affect the healing process.

Belief in and practice of spiritual healing are widespread. As I reported in an earlier article (Poloma 1993), almost three-fourths of Americans claim to believe in healing prayer, and one-third claim to have personally experienced it. Judging from their religious profiles, few would agree with the theology implicit in Dossey's analysis. Dossey, with other health professionals who have been bold enough to recover the human soul, shares a bias against traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs. While I applaud Dossey's bold and creative stance, the sociologist (as well as the Christian) in me is somewhat unsettled. From a scientific viewpoint, I, too, feel more comfortable with the research designs used in studying mold and mice than I do with those that have studied human beings. I question, however, to what extent it is possible to generalize to humans from effects a psychic healer may producer in mice. I am aware that how humans define their reality (including the acceptance of a Judeo-Christian God) has real consequences. These cognitive and affective processes of belief in a personal God may muddy the research waters, but this clouding reflects the complex reality of human life.

The scientific perspective used by Dossey to evaluate the efficacy of healing prayer is but one way (albeit a most important one) of viewing the world. When applied to human action, there is a further dichotomy between those who employ a naturalistic perspective (one that is deterministic, assuming that all can be explained by scientific laws) and the humanistic model (one that acknowledges the voluntary component of human action that makes conclusive statements difficult or impossible). Trained in the natural sciences, Dossey attempts to advance a naturalistic framework that, perhaps inadvertently, undermines the importance of meanings that people attache to events in their lives. It seems appropriate to close with a statement found from the Afterword in which Dossey acknowledges the limitation of his approach.

We invented the scientific method; it did not descend from on high. Even if science's verdict on prayer were completely negative, that would not necessarily be the end of the story. And let us not deceive ourselves. Although science has much to say about prayer, it raises more questions than it answers. The mysteries of prayer not only remain, they deepen. (Pp. 209-10)

References

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