Healing Breakthroughs: How Your Attitudes and Beliefs Can Affect Your Health

by Larry Dossey

Aiming to show the connection between mind, meaning and illness, this book examines how a person's emotions, attitudes and reactions to events, past and present, can affect his or her health and the speed of recovery. Part 1 looks at case histories of sick people and investigates the role of the mind and the meaning of their illnesses. For instance, Dr Dossey discusses the fact that more fatal heart attacks occur at about nine o'clock on Monday mornings that at any other time, and how hearts really can break from grief or shame. The second part proposes a radically different image of the body, and suggests how a person has the power to heal and change through visualizations, music, biofeedback and prayer. Finally, the book proposes that how one feels and thinks about a disease can predict one's recovery or continued illness. Advice is included for people who are in hospital, because being a "good patient" does not necessarily enhance recovery.

304 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1993

About the author

Larry Dossey is a physician and author who propounds the importance for healing of prayer and spirituality. He combines science and prayer to advance the cause of healing the sick.

Larry Dossey studied medicine, graduating from University of Texas at Austin & the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas in 1967. While attending medical school, he became interested in Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Taoism. Severe, recurring migraines prompted him to study biofeedback and meditation in hopes of finding a means of controlling the headaches. He began to practice meditation regularly, while remaining skeptical about the type of praying he had learned in his youth. After graduation, Dossey went on to a distinguished medical career, which included service in Vietnam as a battalion surgeon and residencies at the Veterans Administration Hospital and Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Dossey's curiosity about the connections between science and religion prompted him to begin researching medical studies focused on the power of prayer to aid healing. In the 1980s, Dossey began writing books to document and explain his findings.

Dossey's 1993 book, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine, made it to the New York Times bestseller list and sold close to 150,000 copies in the first three years after its publication.