Luminary: Larry Dossey

Luminary: Larry Dossey

Larry Dossey, M.D. is recognized as one of the world's foremost authorities on the synergy of physical health and spiritual awareness. Decorated for valor as a battalion surgeon in the Vietnam War, Dr. Dossey is former chief of staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital. A former chairperson of the Office of Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health, he is the executive editor of Alternative Therapies Journal, and the author of many books, including Healing Beyond the Body; Reinventing Medicine; and the national bestsellers Healing Words and Prayer Is Good Medicine.

Upon graduating with honors from the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Dossey worked as a pharmacist while earning his M.D. degree from Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, 1967. Before completing his residency in internal medicine, he served as a battalion surgeon in Vietnam, where he was decorated for valor. Dr. Dossey helped establish the Dallas Diagnostic Association, the largest group of internal medicine practitioners in that city, and was Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital in 1982.

An education steeped in traditional Western medicine did not prepare Dr. Dossey for patients who were blessed with "miracle cures," remissions that clinical medicine could not explain. "Almost all physicians possess a lavish list of strange happenings unexplainable by normal science," says Dr. Dossey. "A tally of these events would demonstrate, I am convinced, that medical science not only has not had the last word, it has hardly had the first word on how the world works, especially when the mind is involved."

In his 1989 book Recovering the Soul, he introduced the concept of "nonlocal mind" -- mind unconfined to the brain and body, mind spread infinitely throughout space and time. Since then, "nonlocal mind" has been adopted by many leading scientists as an emerging image of consciousness. Dr. Dossey's ever-deepening explication of nonlocal mind provides a legitimate foundation for the merging of spirit and medicine. The ramifications of such a union are radical and call for no less than the reinvention of medicine.