response, and PNI, even though it's the darling of the emerging
　　　　  sciences, hasn't shed any light on it whatsoever," remarks Larry
　　　　  Dossey, M.D., co-chairman of the Panel on Mind/Body Interventions at
　　　　  the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
　　　　  Dossey's panel falls under the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine, a
　　　　  new 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