Article June 1, 1998 Issue

Spiritual healing—you have what it takes

Discover two key aspects of healing through prayer.

By Colleen Feldmann Douglass

Recently, I Spoke with a psychologist whose expertise is in the field of multiple personalities. After thirty years of practice, he is yearning for more spirituality in working with patients. He has found that a purely secular medical approach does not consider the whole man. Further, his wife has shifted to more holistic options in her field of nursing. She is active in a trend that involves a patient's church community or parish in his or her recovery.

It is generally agreed that healing took a secular turn at the time of Descartes. According to Herbert Benson, associate professor at Harvard Medical School, "Descartes was the first to suggest that the body did not need the mind to function, heightening respect for the machinelike qualities of the body that have become the dominant focus of contemporary Western medicine."^{Herbert Benson and Marg Stark, Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief (New York: Fireside, 1996), p. 67 .} Since that time and until recently, the healing property of spirituality has been diminished in the eyes of most medical practitioners.

Perhaps those voicing concerns similar to the psychologist and nurse with whom I visited are perceiving the emptiness that results from viewing man as simply a machine, and from approaching healing based on a purely mechanical standpoint. Medical practitioners are discovering, little by little, that a patient's health cannot be divorced from his or her thought, and that spirituality is important to healing.

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