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Dossey has written ten
books, among them Space, Time & Medicine; Reinveting Medicine; and the
New York Times bestseller Healing Words. His goal with all of his books
is to anchor the holistic health movement in a model that is
scientifically respectable and that, at the same time, answers to our
inner spiritual needs.
phenomeNEWS: Larry Dossey is one
of the most extraordinary physicians out there. He’s doing fabulous
stuff and has a brand new book that is so much fun! He’s a former
internist and chief of staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital and is
currently the executive editor of Explorer, the Journal of Science and
Healing and the author of nine other books on consciousness and
spirituality in healing. We talked with him when he was in town. His new
book came out on Valentine’s Day. What great timing! Its title is The
Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things: Fourteen Natural Steps
to Health and Happiness, published by Harmony Books. Welcome back, Dr.
Dossey!
DR. Larry Dossey: It’s great to be
back. Thanks for asking me.
You have wonderful tips in this
book. Some of the steps include things people wouldn’t think of, like
bugs and plants and all kinds of interesting concepts that you bring
forth. What was your inspiration for writing this book?
Let me say first that I am an internist
and I practiced internal medicine, taking care of really sick people for
the better part of 20 years. I’ve been involved in internal medicine
most of my adult life. But there are some problems with the way we have
structured our modern healthcare system which I think have gotten us
into deep trouble. I’ll just give you one example about how complex and
unmanageable things have become.
Every year in the United States, around
225,000 people die in hospitals because of medical errors, medical
mistakes and the side effects of the medications we use in the
hospitals. This makes hospital care in our country the third leading
cause of death behind heart disease and cancer. This should be a
national scandal but it just sort of slips under the radar screen of
most people. They just accept it as the way things are. I began to think
we’d taken our eye off the ball. Most of us, 90 percent of the time,
don’t need high-tech complex medicine and so the premise of the book is
that there are many less-lethal ways of taking care of our health – that
pay huge dividends for our personal health – than what one sees in
high-tech medicine most of the time.
So this is a collection of things I
think that are utterly safe, usually free, which, if we put them to
work, would really pay huge dividends for our personal health.
We love that you started it out
with optimism because that’s one of our favorite things too.
You sound optimistic to me. As noted in
the chapter on optimism, you are in line to enjoy some health benefits
that pessimists, on average, do not enjoy. For example, the fact that
you’re an optimist suggests that your immune system is more robust and
active than the immune system in most pessimists. Your cardiovascular
system is more stable. You have lower levels of stress hormones in your
blood than we see in pessimists. So it’s important for people to
understand that optimism is not just a feeling that floats around in
your head somewhere north of your clavicles. It is not an exaggeration
to say that the sense of optimism penetrates the rest of the body and
probably affects every organ system in the body.
So the bottom line is that optimists
live longer than pessimists do, on average, and optimists have a lower
incidence of all the major diseases that you want to bring up. The major
point in optimism from a medical point of view is its health effects and
they’re profound. So congratulations on being an optimist!
Get happy and stay healthy… get
happy and stay there! You mention some other real interesting things and
your sense of humor came through in the book, too, Dr. Dossey.
Oh, I’m so happy.
We laughed in more than one spot,
especially the story about the cat in the well.
That scandalized my sister. Every time
I tell her that I’m writing about our origins back on the farm, she
cringes. The cat in the well was an example which I’ll never forget. The
point in talking about the cat that fell into the well and we drank the
water for a long time without knowing about it, is to bring up the idea
that exposure to a little dirt in your life every once in a while – I’m
talking literally about dirt and bacteria that go along with it – is a
welcome stimulus to the immune system, particularly in children when
their immune systems are still developing.
There’s something in infectious disease
in medicine now, which is called the hygiene hypothesis. This is the
idea that we’re all better off if we give up our total obsession with
hygiene and cleanliness and have exposure to nature in the form of
getting a little bit dirty from time to time. I’m not talking about
stopping taking showers or anything like that, but the exposure to
uncleanliness occasionally is a good thing for the health of the immune
system.
Like getting down and playing in
the mud.
Making mud pies. How many mothers do
you know anymore who allow their children to do those things?
We can remember eating mud pies
as children. It didn’t do us any harm.
I’m sure you are better off for it.
This has actually been looked at by infectious disease and allergy
people. We know that children who grow up with exposure to a little dirt
in their lives grow up to have a lesser incidence of asthma and
allergies than kids who are just kept squeaky clean all the time.
Absolutely. That brings to mind
of how people go to very expensive spas to get mud baths. What’s that
about? That’s soaking in water and dirt... and they’re paying for it!
That’s exactly right.
One of the healthy things that we used
to do on the farm was to grow a garden. You can’t work in the garden
without getting dirt under your fingernails and other places, too. Of
course, we didn’t know it at the time, but that was an extraordinarily
therapeutic thing to be doing as a kid, out there poking around in the
dirt.
It’s still fun for people who
love to garden.
Indeed it is.
One of the intriguing chapters
was the one titled “Unhappiness.” Talk to us about that one.
We have an obsession in this country
about feeling good and upbeat and happy all the time. I imagine if you
asked most people what they want most out of life, they would say
something like, “Well, I just want to be happy.” Of course we do, but
that doesn’t mean there’s not a role for feeling morose and feeling
unhappy from time to time.
The insistence that we always should be
upbeat and really feeling on Cloud 9 all the time has led to the
epidemic use of medications, all sorts of psychotropic drugs to combat
depression, feeling down, feeling blue and so on.
Depression is real. It can lead to
suicide. And I’m not arguing against medicating, but we’ve really gone
overboard. We’ve even visited this plague of medications on our children
now and in many incidences, I think this is just scandalous.
There is a place in life for just
simply being in the moment and observing our moods, regardless of what
they happen to be. We can learn from those moments of being down. What
is it that put us there? How did we contribute to this? How can we get
out of it? If we’re upbeat all the time, we’re not very resilient. It’s
those moments where we really have to look inward and examine our darker
feelings in order to grow as human beings.
Every spiritual tradition that’s worth
its salt advises people to focus on the darker moments in life and learn
from it, to be with it, to simply witness them without censoring them.
If we’re willing to do that, we find
that a flip often happens, that the unhappy dark moments make us
stronger, more resilient and more likely to enjoy a fulfilling, happy
sense of serenity at other times. So we need both.
Right. You have to experience the
contrast of the valleys to experience the pinnacles.
Well put, yes.
There are so many other
interesting chapters, like the one on “Forgetting” because it seems easy
to do these days.
Forgetting is really something that
most people want to run in the other direction from.
As we get older and we can’t remember
where we put our glasses or car keys, we think we’ve got early
Alzheimer’s or something. Everybody wants a perfect memory.
I’ve gone back in history to look at
some real characters who had almost flawless memories. As a matter of
fact, they couldn’t forget stuff.
There is a case in the book of a
Russian man who was studied by a famous psychologist over many decades.
He could not forget. He could recall details of conversations, what
people were wearing, what he ate for dinner on a particular day, 30 or
40 years earlier and his mind was a wreck. He could not focus on
important things. His mind was flooded with detail. If you look at
people like this, you can see that forgetting can be a blessing.
If we hang on to everything, our minds
are simply crowded with stuff, with trivia. So we need to forget. I have
forgotten probably 99 percent of everything I was taught in medical
school and I’ve replaced it, I hope, with more valuable information
that’s more helpful to my patients than when I was practicing internal
medicine. If I’d hung on to the old stuff, God knows where I would have
put the new information. We don’t look at forgetting this way, but it
can be something that’s really very valuable, helping us in a lot of
different ways.
I think probably the most valuable
connection with forgetting for us is, as in the old phrase “forgive and
forget.” If we can’t forget slights and things that happen to us, that
other people do from time to time, it’s not likely that we’re going to
be very forgiving. If we can’t forgive and forget in that way, our lives
can be miserable. We can also wreck other people’s lives by visiting
aggression and hostility on them. So a certain amount of forgetting is
healthy in many, many ways.
Especially if you’ve held
something like a hurt and you can’t even remember what caused the hurt,
then you’ve automatically forgiven them.
That’s exactly right. You know, there
is a huge new area of research on forgetting and forgiving. There’s a
group of researchers called forgiveness researchers who are really
taking this head on. What they found is that people who cannot forgive
and forget have a higher level of stress hormones most of the time. And
this is just not good for your health. This is like being under constant
stress all the time with resentment and anger and so on.
So forgiveness therapy is making an
appearance in certain areas in medicine these days.
That’s excellent. It’s about
time, too.
It is.
Another chapter was on novelty.
It was interesting when you wrote about Buckminster Fuller saying that
people should change their occupations every 10 years.
I actually heard Buckminster Fuller
give a talk once, just right before he died, where he advised that. And
boy, he lived it. He was onto new ideas. They just kept popping up
throughout his life.
Actually, this has been affirmed – the
value of change and novelty and taking on new things – has been affirmed
by human studies. I’ve found the rat studies in this area kind of cute.
There have been studies done, now, with mice of two types: mice who
courageously take on running mazes that they’ve never seen before quite
easily, as if they enjoy it and they’re called the neophilic mice. Then
there are the neophobic mice that just will not run a new maze. They
just hate new things, new encounters, novel experiences. If you compare
the life spans, the mice that take on the new mazes live almost half
again as long as the mice who avoid the new experience. If you look at
the mice studies, they’re very interesting. It suggests that taking on
new, novel challenges may be good for us. And if you flip this into the
human domain, I believe you see research now, particularly in women who,
if they take on new experiences eagerly, beginning in middle age, they
live much longer than women who avoid new experiences and seem to prefer
habits and ruts and routines. So novelty seems to be one of those
ordinary things that has extraordinary health consequences.
It also keeps you fresh.
I think so, too.
It reminds us of what Helen
Keller once said, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”
Yes. That’s great. This whole approach
to novelty is also related to a couple of other chapters in the book,
particularly the one on risk taking. If you encounter something novel
and new, you’re taking a little risk. It reminds me of that old saying
that the only people who ever get anywhere interesting in life are those
who get lost. So there’s truth to that, I think and not just from a
psychological point of view, as I mentioned. I’m impressed by the human
studies, particularly in women, that show that taking on new things has
health consequences.
Absolutely. We also liked the
chapter about bugs. In it, you mention the use of leaches and maggots.
It’s interesting that medicine is rediscovering them as a healing tool
these days.
Maggots and leaches were widely used in
the 1800s in Western Europe and the United States. In fact, we imported
leaches from Germany and France. People now have no idea how popular
maggots and leaches were in the 19th century. They virtually disappeared
when antibiotics came on board in the late 1930s and the post-World War
II years, especially. If you’ve got potent antibiotics, who needs these
other things? But they have come back.
One of the most dramatic cases that
responded to maggot therapy recently was Lt. Kevin Shaeffer who was
burned on over 50 percent of his body at the Pentagon on 9/11. He was
not dong well and was not expected to live, but his surgeon ordered
maggots and applied them to his body to clean up the infected tissue. He
made a marvelous recovery and most people who are familiar with the case
say that this would not have happened without the use of maggots.
In the book I write about the “yuck”
factor. Most people can’t get past the yuck feeling about these things,
but I think that will change once we develop more hospital-acquired
infections that are resistant to antibiotics. I think this is one of
those interesting ideas from medical history that we thought we had
disposed of. It’s crude and repugnant to a lot of people, but if you’re
in a situation where this can save your life, you have a different way
of looking at it.
Oh, absolutely. Bring on the
bugs!
One more thing in defense of bugs. The
Pentagon is investing millions of dollars using moths, crickets, bees
and maggots in what is being called biosentinals. This is like the
canary in the mine. These little creepy crawlies sometimes are better
than we are at detecting poisons in the environment.
So who knows how this research is going
to turn out and which bugs will turn out to be the best biosentinals to
detect possible terrorist biochemical and microbiological attacks. I’m
cheering the bugs on.
There was a recent article in a
scientific journal about dogs. They’re training dogs now to sniff out
mold and mildew and different kinds of allergic substances. That’s
amazing, too.
Another amazing use of dogs is to train
them to sniff out certain skin cancers. Melanoma-sniffing dogs have a
success rate that is quite impressive. Stay tuned on that one, too.
There are so many interesting
things coming up on the horizon and interestingly enough, though they’re
“new,” they’re not really new. They’re just being rediscovered.
Exactly. They’re being reinvented and
certainly most of the things I write about have been around forever, as
a matter of fact.
Like plants.
Absolutely. What’s new about optimism
and novelty? These are experiences that are part of human history.
Now they’re gaining some sort of
sanction.
Scientific validation, yes.
Well, there may be a day when we
can just get a plant, herb, spice or a bug for a headache, something
that won’t have the side effects, like some of the prescription drugs
have.
Yes. The statistics are perfectly
deplorable. It’s sort of a “duh” question really. Are there safer things
to do? Of course the answer is yes and so we ought to plan our lives so
that we don’t need the complex, high-tech, expensive and often injurious
methods.
As an internist I used those methods
all my life and I’m not here to condemn them. They’re valuable when they
are needed and they’re helpful if used wisely. But my point is that most
of us can avoid exposures to those risky, expensive procedures, if we
plan our lives properly.
Absolutely. You related a story
on the dirt from Chimayo in New Mexico. It’s a magical place and it’s
right there in your own back yard!
It is less than 30 miles from where I
live and it’s called the Lourdes of the Southwest because of the
healings that go on there, many of which sure look miraculous to me. You
go out to the little church and in one of the side rooms, you see all
the crutches that are hanging on the wall. I actually met one of those
persons once who went there. She originally came in a wheelchair and she
left walking. She came back every year as a pilgrimage to pay homage to
what had happened to her there.
And you have a good story about
being interviewed there. Tell us what happened.
That was an interview following my 1993
book on the healing power of prayer. The book is Healing Words and it
made a national splash. So one of the major networks sent a team to
interview me. They wanted to do it in a religious setting so we traipsed
out to Chimayo, to the little chapel there, for filming. The problem was
the host of the interview was just getting over a severe cold and cough.
He was going into this monologue to set up the interview with me, but he
couldn’t get through it because he would start coughing. So we tried it
many times. It was getting late in the day. They were all frantic. The
light was fading. The whole thing looked like it was headed for
disaster. The lore is that the dirt is special at this place, much like
the water is special at Lourdes. So I asked him to halt while I went in
and got some of the sacred dirt that had been blessed by the priest
there. I came out and rubbed it on his throat. I really rubbed it in. He
thought I was nuts. But I thought if people can come and rub dirt on
their legs and leave their crutches, we might be able to at least fix a
sore throat. So then I asked him to try it again. And so he did his
monologue the next time perfectly. He didn’t believe it, didn’t want to
believe it and insisted on doing it again. Again, his monologue was
flawless and his voice kept getting stronger and stronger. He was really
irritated by that because he was a real skeptic about this stuff and
didn’t want this to work, but it did.
I’m sorry that the cameras weren’t
rolling for this because this would have been the program to focus on, a
little minor dirt miracle there, right in northern New Mexico, just
north of Santa Fe.
This has been fascinating, as it
always is with you, Dr. Dossey. Do you have a website?
Yes. It’s
www.dosseydossey.com – the
reason for the double name is that my wife, Barbara, who is also an
author, and I share the website.
Thank you so much. Keep up the
good work. |
