Conscious Choice: The Doctor of “Soul Food”

January 2002 | Health Conscious

The Doctor of “Soul Food”

by Rebecca Ephraim, RD, CCN

Soul food...I’m not talking about African-American delicacies, although those comfort foods can certainly promote feelings of fulfillment. The soul food I’m referring to is the kind that actually nourishes our souls and promotes self-awareness and healing — at least according to a growing body of research!

You don’t have to hang out at the local place of worship to qualify for spiritual healing. In fact, from my casual observation there are many people with a spiritual bent who assiduously avoid the trappings of any kind of organized religion. In the context I’m discussing, spirituality is generally characterized as the condition of being in touch with one’s higher powers. And the knowledge that one can access his or her higher powers is proving to be a very effective form of medicine.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona, M.D., Ph.D. is an integrative medicine doctor who has incorporated prayer and other spiritual rituals into his practice. Dr. Mehl-Madrona, quiet, thoughtful, and soft-spoken, is a modern-day medicine man if there ever was one. Part Cherokee, part Lakota, he has interwoven his Native American Indian spiritual practices — such as sweat lodges and purification rituals — with his conventional medicine training in family practice, psychiatry, and geriatrics — as well as a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. He currently does research and sees patients at the Center for Health and Healing at the Beth Israel Medical Center and Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

In other words, this guy’s no slouch in the eyes of our Western-based medical system.

Yet well before his structured academics, the forty-seven-year-old physician did his time in more touchy-feely healing circles. As a young boy in rural Kentucky, he watched his great-grandmother, a Native American Indian healer, work with patients. He observed that people could be cured through magical, miraculous events. The other lesson he learned was that healers could help patients by listening to them.

However, he found both of these dimensions of healing to be glaringly absent during his medical training at Stanford University Medical School and later in his residencies. Fast-forward to today and you find a conventionally trained physician who’s been bucking the system for nearly thirty years. He practices acupuncture, hypnosis, and relaxation therapy but also draws from his background by calling upon spiritual rites and ceremonies and, most often, prayer. "I think if prayer were a drug," he says, "you would be sued for not recommending it. The studies are overwhelmingly positive for prayer. [A person’s] specific religious orientation doesn’t matter as far as anyone can tell."

Numerous studies confirm the doctor’s stance and show sweeping majorities of patients wanting, as one study puts it, "spiritual factors to be addressed as part of their medical care." Dr. Mehl-Madrona highlights this with an account of a patient who had come to him with a lung cancer so big that she could hardly breathe. "She was full of anxiety and depression," he says. "I told her a Hopi story about wrestling with the god of death. I created a ceremony with her to negotiate with death and to get to know death, to pray for longer life, to directly ask for it. By doing the ceremony, she started to feel better with less anxiety and fear and more hope.

"She had radiation therapy. At the end of treatment, there were no signs of any cancer, which was pretty dramatic according to the radiation therapist. I think it was fate kicking in with her prayers and ceremonies that created a little miracle...that surprised everyone." The doctor emphasizes that he prays with patients only when appropriate — meaning that if a patient has no interest in it, he won’t go there.

Of course there’s been much discussion on the power of prayer and spirituality in the last few years but nobody has really forced the issue the way Dr. Mehl-Madrona has. And that has made him the target of criticism and ostracism throughout his entire career. Most recently, Quack Busters, an organization that bills itself as "Your guide to health fraud, quackery and intelligent decisions" (www.quackwatch.com), set its sites on destroying Dr. Mehl-Madrona’s career.

Quack Busters has been criticized as a propaganda Web site aimed at discrediting leading-edge health practitioners and health philosophies. Indeed, the site pooh-poohs everything from acupuncture to naturopathy and homeopathy to nutritional supplementation and chiropractic. But the organization went after Dr. Mehl-Madrona with a particular vengeance in 2000 because of his prayer activities with patients. Quack Busters pursued a massive letter-writing campaign in Pittsburgh where Mehl-Madrona was director of the Center for Complementary Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Because of the backlash, he stepped down from his director’s post and was denied work for two months. "They [Quack Busters] were alleging that I was leading people on by making them believe that spiritual forces could intervene and help them to heal...that I claim to have met people for whom that’s been true." Obviously he knows people who benefited from the power of prayer. That’s why he does it. But he stresses that, contrary to what the Quack Busters have insinuated, he himself has no power to cure. "What I tend to say to people is,‘I’m not the expert here. I’m going to teach you how to be the expert.’ I insist that they share the responsibility for what we do together. I think people get well faster when they take responsibility."

However, Dr. Mehl-Madrona says that makes some people very angry. They prefer their physician to take control so that they don’t have to participate in their own healing; doctor-in-control is a hallmark of Western medicine. He says a spiritual dimension for such people complicates a simplistic view that says everything is mechanical and accidental. In other words, an unseen spiritual force can be very frightening to some people.

Nonetheless, as Dr. Mehl-Madrona points out, the research suggests that if you take care of people’s emotional and spiritual needs when they are in crisis, their consumption of medical services goes down. He also cites results of a Gallup poll and his own casual surveys. The results, he says, indicate that most physicians believe in God. "They believe that faith can heal people and that sometimes God intervenes in human affairs. That’s the wild card, the magic.... It completely justifies our struggle to do this kind of work.... We all want to see those incredible healings."

Dr. Mehl-Madrona has written a book detailing his spiritual medicine experiences entitled Coyote Medicine: Lessons from Native American Healing.

Disclaimer: This column is for information only and no part of its contents should be construed as medical advice, diagnosis, recommendation or endorsement by Ms. Ephraim.

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