But she kept seeing the revolving door. "People would get discharged, but then shortly after they'd come back, and that would keep happening until they died." Her real wake-up call came when her father died from a medication reaction. She went back to her roots, learning Chinese medicine and actively promoting it.
Guru of Grace
Larry Dossey, M.D.
Home base: Santa Fe, New Mexico
Claim: Prayer can have a profound effect on improving health, as can other intangible factors such as optimism, music, and plants.
Claim to fame: Author of Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine.
Argument: People who follow a spiritual path live 7 to 13 years longer. "The effects of spirituality and consciousness on health are so profound that we are no longer justified in turning away from these ideas," says Dossey.
His regimen: Every morning, Dossey says a silent prayer of gratitude. His prayers most closely resemble those of Buddhists, who "pray like nuts, but don't offer their prayers to a supreme being. I tease my religious friends about viewing God as a communications satellite," says Dossey. "But prayer isn't sent to someplace, it simply is." In fact, he doesn't even like the word "prayer," preferring "prayerfulness," which captures the idea that it's not what you say but the way you are. Being grateful, Dossey believes, is one of the best ways to be.
Must-do recommendation: People should pray, but in a way that feels most comfortable to them. When writer-monk Thomas Merton, who was known to have a deep prayer life, was asked how he prayed, he said, "By breathing." Dossey believes that ideally prayer should become an integral part of how you live and "how you are"—as natural as breathing.
Research nuts and bolts: In 1988, Dossey heard about the first significant controlled clinical trial of prayer: Patients who were prayed for—unbeknownst to them—did better. That study has since been questioned, but Dossey began praying for his patients as an internist, deciding that not doing so was like withholding a valuable medication. He also researched every prayer study he could find; two-thirds showed positive results.
Inspiration: Dossey began his career as a "dedicated materialist," believing that no alternative therapy was in the same league as drugs and surgical procedures. But he was afflicted with migraine headaches so severe they blinded him. During medical school, they got so bad he tried to drop out. The only thing that kept him in school: His adviser wouldn't accept his withdrawal. Dossey cycled through every conventional treatment, but none worked. In desperation, he tried biofeedback, in which blood pressure, sweating, body temperature, and other measures were monitored and fed back to patients. Ninety-nine percent of Dossey's migraine symptoms disappeared.
Dossey went on to start one of the first biofeedback labs in Texas. He became fascinated with how modifications of consciousness could benefit health. Later, he became more interested in spiritual issues in medicine.
When Dossey wrote Healing Words, only three medical schools offered courses on spirituality and health. Today, more than 90 do.
The Vitamin Cure
Andrew W. Saul, Ph.D.
Home base: Hamlin, New York
Claim: High doses of vitamins alone can prevent and cure serious illness.
Claim to fame: Author of Fire Your Doctor! How to Be Independently Healthy.
Argument: For more than 60 years, researchers have shown that the use of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and essential fatty acids to treat disease and promote wellness—known as orthomolecular medicine—can reverse impending blindness, improve multiple sclerosis, combat mental illness, shrink malignancies, cure arthritis, restore damaged immune systems, and rebuild hips without surgery.
His regimen: In addition to following a "high-fiber, high-veggie, non-junk-food, very-low-meat diet," Saul takes a multivitamin with every meal as well as megadoses of vitamins C and E, omega-3 fish oils, lecithin, and zinc. Why such large quantities of nutrients? "The first rule of building a brick wall," says Saul, "is to have enough bricks."
Must-do recommendations: Everyone can benefit from a near-vegetarian diet, regular exercise, and vitamin C "to saturation," says Saul. People with arthritis should take B6, niacinamide, and C. Those losing their eyesight due to macular degeneration should take vitamins C and E, selenium, zinc, and carotene.
What he's most interested in now: Saul is fighting what he sees as a conspiracy by the National Library of Medicine, which refuses to index The Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, though it is peer-reviewed and seems to meet their criteria.
Inspiration: In the 1960s, two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling began experimenting with very large doses of vitamin C; Pauling went on to name and delineate the field of orthomolecular medicine.
Intrigued by these ideas, Saul began testing them on himself. During one illness, he fasted for several days. "I felt the best I had ever felt while feeling bad," he recalls. He treated bouts of pneumonia with high doses of vitamin C. "Experience showed me that erythromycin will not cure it as fast as high-dose vitamin C," he asserts. He says his father has been able to rid himself of angina by taking vitamin E.
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