Excerpts from Newsletter Transcript

In this section from the show, cardiovascular surgeon Mehmet Oz describes his experience of the intersection of Western medicine and human spirituality, including the value of prayer in healing and the impact of his medical career on his own spiritual journey.

Tippett: So how do all of your experiences as a doctor change your definition of what quality of life means?

Dr. Oz: Well, quality of life has changed a lot for me as I've witnessed patients. For me, it was initially just life. Being alive was quality of life. And it is true that if you're not alive, there's not much quality. But staying alive by itself is not the only goal. We as a society have to mature our views of death and dying in order to cope with the reality that we have science now that can do more than we want it to do. And quality of life has become a dominant element of my discussions with patients. I've had older Americans come to my office and tell me that although they are perfectly physically able to have surgery, they didn't have anything to live for. All their loved ones had passed along; their families had gone their different ways. They were pretty much just biding their time waiting. So why would they bother having life-threatening surgery that would just prolong their existence when they've had a great—and, by the way, they're not depressed—they've had a great life. And they've done it. They're ready. That is a conversation that would have troubled me much more when I was younger. When someone tells me that now and they have good reasons to what they're saying, I'm accepting of that.

Tippett: Then you would not perform the surgery?

Dr. Oz: It's not even a matter of performing the surgery. As a physician, you have a precious covenant with your patient, and because they generally trust you, you can talk them into things. So it's not a matter of whether I would do it or not, it's whether I would try to talk them into something that maybe I wouldn't talk myself into when I was in their shoes. Although I just turned 44 so I can't truly identify with an 88-year-old patient twice my age who might feel this way, I begin to see the wisdom in at least that discussion. After all, if you don't have a good reason for your heart to keep beating, it usually won't, and some of these folks have thought that process through better than I have.

Tippett: I want to come back a little bit to this idea of prayer. I would like to know through the study you took part in and through using this technique in your work as a heart surgeon, how have you come to think about what the value is of prayer? What's happening in that? How that can be legitimately integrated into medical care.

Dr. Oz: Well, we never prayed in the MANTRA trial. We never asked the pray-ers to pray for the patient to survive, we asked them to pray that "Thy will be done." We asked them to pray for what was best for the patient to happen. So maybe if you're 85 years old and you have metastasis cancer and you've got no one left in the world, maybe the answer to the prayer is to let you go gracefully from a heart attack which is, after all, not the worst way to go. It's painless and it's quick. So we do have to be cautious, as the saying goes, for what we wish for because it might come true.

But I do think the opposite approach would be to ignore the potential power of prayer. And, again, I do want to be cautious. When I speak of prayer, I'm not even talking particularly of the organized religion behind the prayer. It's really the role of spirit and whether or not there's an energy behind the spirit that we can tap into and take advantage of—an energy that is spoken of in most religions and that we generally completely ignore in Western medicine because we can't measure it. It would be, I think, an abdication of my responsibility as a healer to not at least look into those opportunities.

I've always been intrigued by this. You called me Dr. Oz earlier. Now "doctor" comes from the Latin root for "teacher." But you'd also say that I went to medical school, "medicine" means "healer," and physician comes from the Greek for "physics" or "science." So even in the way in which you call me what I am, you describe me as a teacher, a healer, and a scientist. So I need to be either able to wear three hats on top of one another or at least shift gears between the three opportunities. And science, unfortunately, meets a roadblock once in a while. As we wait for that paradigm shift in understanding or insight that will allow us to go to the next level with science, which I'm confident we will do, we sometimes have to allow elements of faith or belief or insight, intuition.

For example, this is, perhaps, a little bit off the topic, but what gave Einstein the idea that there were particles or waves in physics? Is it possible that he was colored at all by looking at Impressionist paintings that had been done for the past 30 years which created light from dots? And just as in that example, art colored, perhaps, the thinking of, if not Einstein, other physicists of the time. Medicine and physicians, we have an understanding of energy. We have a digital world. We have insights into technologies that we haven't yet applied in the context of the human body that we probably one day in this next generation will gain insights to.

Tippett: So when I read your story and read about you, one thing that jumps out at me that's rather simple, but very profound in its effect, is that while you are a highly-trained, highly-skilled doctor, you're also very open to seeing what's happening with your patients and even experiencing the birth of your children and always questioning the limits of medicine and then reaching out for other resources which, in your case, alternative treatments. And I wonder if maybe—you said you're 44 now—do you think there's a generational shift? I mean, do you think that more doctors your age are simply more open to the complexity of the whole experiences of healing and health?

Dr. Oz: I think there are many more opportunities for younger physicians to get that exposure, in part because the generation before us was still striving to figure out the basics of how to keep folks alive using science. In 1955, you would not have had heart surgery because we couldn't do it. In 2005, I can do two operations in the morning and be at a radio show in the afternoon. It's a completely different world. In 1955, my main goal would be to save that kid's life using new insights in science that even two years earlier didn't exist. In 2005, I know I can save that child's life, but I know that there are elements of depression and disconnect that might occur in the post-operative period. And I know that even more importantly than the hole that I fixed, there are other issues that will challenge that child that I need to get addressed if I'm doing my job as the healer. So the game has gotten more complicated. Because we have the honor of standing on the shoulders of our forebears, at least in medicine, we can see further. I can see the mountain in the distance. I can dream about things that they didn't have the luxury of dreaming of because patients were dying in front of them for reasons that they thought they could easily fix. People don't die in front of us today for easily fixable reasons, and that pushes us to look a little further for true healing.

Tippett: But I think what's ironic and so interesting about it is that some of the places you're looking are ancient traditions that previous generations of doctors would have considered to be very simple, would think that the West had outgrown, right? I mean, acupuncture or…

Dr. Oz: Absolutely. But that is the globalization of medicine, and as we explore beyond the borders that have traditionally limited us, it takes us to places that we're not too comfortable. But that's what it's all about. In a way, for me, life is about being comfortable with being uncomfortable. It's about taking yourself and the people that trust you on a life journey because that's what health is all about. We all have our own individual health parade through life. It's a serpentine path that takes us to places we didn't expect, but that's part of our life experience. Our job may be to incorporate approaches that we never could have envisioned playing a role in recovery, but now because we have the luxury of looking a little further, we can identify.

Tippett: What I hear in a lot of what you're saying is maybe that… When we first started speaking, you described going into medicine wanting to make the world a better place. It sounds to me like being a doctor and working at the cutting edge of science, in fact, has made you, perhaps, a more spiritual person. Is that right? Is that true?

Dr. Oz: There is no question that I've become more spiritual because of the practice of medicine, particularly because I wandered into a field that was high-tech, and so the illusion that I could find salvation through science alone was no longer present.

Tippett: Can you say something about how your particular spiritual sensibility or practice has been concretely shaped by your experiences as a doctor?

Dr. Oz: Well, for one, as I look at how my spirituality has changed, I've become more comfortable re-exploring spirit. There was a time in my life where I spent a lot of time thinking only on this topic, and it was actually during my college years when I was not atypically trying to just figure what the heck was going on so I could get on with my life. And, as many folks do, I got on with my life and for 15 years or so didn't think much about religion beyond the necessary elements of making sure the kids went to Sunday school or that we dealt with the religious holidays. But as I've grown more and more attuned to what my patients are asking for, I've become more insightful to my own needs.

I do want to correct one thing you said that was kind about me. You said that I went into medicine to make the world a better place. And although without being falsely modest, that was truly a driving force for me, there was clearly a narcissistic element to this. I really wanted to study me. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be an explorer, and I wanted to know about why we are here and what we are doing here. I thought medicine would take me there, and it has, but not all the way. To continue the journey, I have to go beyond where science, in its traditional context, would take me and look for clues to what the next steps may be. Spirituality helps me along that path quite a bit.

In fact, a lot of my personal interest in yoga comes from a recognition that I can reach a Zen experience, a blissful existence, if I can get my body, my mind calm together. And yoga does that for me as well as any other element. I appreciate hymns, chanting, much more today than I did when I was a school child because I see in that a sense of peace and emptiness that frees me. These are insights that I think you have to be a bit more seasoned—at least I felt I had to be a bit more seasoned—to appreciate. Without the insight that medicine has provided and my teachers or the patients have provided me, I wouldn't have wandered upon it.

Tippett: People who are close to death often experience a sense of a reality of another level of reality. And I wonder as a surgeon who is sometimes with people in those moments when they're hovering between life and death, do you experience something palpably?

Dr. OZ: I don't normally experience the near-death element in part because I'm pretty busy trying to prevent the death. But there is no question that you sense a deep-seated loss when a patient dies. It doesn't go away. You can hide it and bandage it better as you get more experience dealing with death. But when someone leaves and you didn't want them to leave or you don't think they wanted to leave, the sense of loss is deep. It's a coldness that's inside of you. And it takes another person to get rid of it, either the family member of the patient or your own family, in my case, frequently where I go for recharging. But that is a very draining experience, and it's something that I suspect one day we'll be able to put numbers on and measure and quantify. But for today, I would just call it sadness, a cold sadness.

Tippett: You mean the body is still there. Physically everything is in the room that was there before, but something tangible.

Dr. Oz: It's something non-tangible, unmeasurable. If I was using a Harry Potter analogy, I'd say there was one of those goblins had come in and stolen my very Chi, my very essence.

Tippett: You have a lot of lovely quotations in your book, Sufi quotations, and also Maimonides and all kinds of people talking. But there's one that's in the body of what you've written, and it's William Blake. There's just something in the way you put it into the text that made me think it's really meaningful for you. I want to read it and just ask you what this means for you as a person and as a doctor. You said that Blake wrote "To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour."

Dr. Oz: Well, William Blake was actually Swedenborgian. And Swedenborg is the Swedish philosopher whose writings resulted in a Protestant sect after his name which is based in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, and it's my wife's religion. I was particularly attracted to the writings of Swedenborg because they provided a clarity that I found lacking in many other traditions. William Blake's quote so beautifully identifies that because what he's really talking about is this concept of complementarity, a term that was coined actually by Niels Bohr, the famous physicist in the 1920s. And complementarity was a term that meant that you could have two mutually exclusive answers to a problem and they could both be right. Now how could that be?

Well, in physics, it was wave theory and particle theory. It was a thought that energy could be both in embolus and in a wave. Why? Because it didn't actually ever exist in either form. It was a tendency to exist in a particular location that defined it. And once you got past your concrete thought processes about what energy was, you could actually come to peace with this complementarity reality. William Blake is talking about the same thing. How can the world be in a grain of sand? How can infinity be in a second? These are mutually exclusive possibilities. It challenges your basic underlying understanding of what reality really is. And when you move past a physical understanding of reality and start to acknowledge a more spiritual foundation for what reality truly is, you begin to realize that we live in a world where 99 percent is pretend and one percent is real. What we're striving for as human beings is that un-modulated experience, that unmitigated exposure to the one percent of reality. That's where medicine has taken me, and that's where patients who are struggling to survive are going.

Tippett: They certainly hear the analogies in this idea of complementarity and what you are exploring and experimenting with in medicine, which might seem to some to be two very different worldviews of Western medicine and traditional approaches to medicine. You've also observed that traditional medicine does make room for a nonphysical aspect to the human being, to energies that can be involved in healing in the way that Western medicine doesn't. There is this acknowledgment of a reality of transcendence in these lines of Blake as well.

Dr. Oz: Yeah, I think Blake highlighted that beautifully in his poetry. I think it's evident in many of the stories that we face in our lives, but we have to open our eyes and our ears to hear and see them. That's often where our shortcoming is. That's where, crazy as it sounds, being ill offers you a growth opportunity because you're much more willing to pay attention to subtle things if you have the threat of that experience being taken away from you.