Welcome to the Mind-Body Revolution

Dossey's panel falls under the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine, a government entity that has appeared as suddenly as an April crocus in the courtyard of the nation's firmest bastion of biomedical research. The office's allotment of $2 million of the $10 billion NIH behemoth "the flea on the elephant, pen-and-pencil money," says director Joseph Jacobs, M.D., the superbly trained half-Mohawk Indian health-care expert tapped to helm what he calls "the Starship Enterprise"—could be used to study anything from acupuncture to herbal medicine to the antitumoral properties of shark cartilage.

But it is Dossey's panel that promises to become the Enterprise's glowing, dilithium-crystal core, for its mandate is to zero in on therapies—from hypnosis and biofeedback to exotica like therapeutic touch and prayer—where the driving force of healing is Western philosophy's most debated (and science's most derided) factor x—the human spirit.

Dossey, who grew up in a hardscrabble, King Cotton Texas prairie town where life revolved around a one-room country church, seems undaunted. In his teens, he played gospel piano for a fiery tent-show evangelist before leaving the farm for college and medical school, then served as a battalion surgeon in Vietnam. After entering private practice, Dossey found himself reading works of Eastern and Western spirituality "insatiably." He took up the practice of meditation, eventually writing a series of well-received books exploring the intersection of medicine and mysticism.

A report of the Panel on Mind/Body Interventions, which Dossey coauthored, loses no time assailing the trepid with the Really Big Questions: "What are mind and consciousness? How and where do they originate? How are they related to the physical body? Why is it necessary to reintroduce mind and consciousness into the modern medical agenda?"

"Let me tell you something," confides Dossey in soft, still-detectable Texas diphthongs. "If we ignore issues of consciousness, it'll be the ruin of alternative medicine. It could wind up just being something used as ruthlessly as synthetic drugs or stainless-steel scalpels. In my opinion, the most important research activity in the entire field will be the investigation of nonlocal manifestations of consciousness."

Nonlocal manifestations of consciousness? Have we fallen off the edge of the map? The panel's report explains that "studies in mental and spiritual healing show that the mind can somehow bring about changes in far-away physical bodies, even when the distant person is shielded from all known sensory and electromagnetic influences. These events, replicated by careful observers under laboratory conditions, strongly suggest that there is some aspect of the psyche that is unconfinable to points in space, such as brain or body, or to points in time, as in the present moment."

The eye comes to a screeching halt seeing such phrases laid out, neat as you please, in an official document of the United States government. These are not the florid, metaphysical ramblings of a 19th-century occultist, but the words whispered in the side corridors of the highest citadel of American rationalism: The mind, it is rumored, has escaped the brain.

"These ideas do have a pretty high Boggle Factor," Dossey admits, but he claims the evidence is mounting. He points to the work of William G. Brand, Ph.D., senior research associate at San Antonio's Mind Science Foundation: In a typical experiment, one person—called the "influencer"—was placed in one room, while in a different part of the building a "subject," fingers hooked up to electrodes to measure galvanic skin response, settled into a chair. At randomly selected times, the influencer tried to affect the subject's electrodermal response by, for example, visualizing the subject while repeating, "Relax ... relax...." Later analysis showed that the subject's electrodermal responses had varied at the same time as the influencer's thoughts, at a rate 43,000 to one against chance.