Larry Dossey passed away peacefully at home in Santa Fe on Tuesday, August 25, 2026, with his wife, Barbie, by his side. He was 85 years old [1]
Larry Dossey, MD | September 27, 1940 – August 25, 2026
I wanted to say something here because Larry has such a long history with our journals. He founded “Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine” and was Executive Editor of its very first issue in 1995. He held that post until 2004 [2] (R. Benson, written communication, August 2026). That is a sister publication to this one under InnoVision. He went on to co-found “EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing” in 2005, published by Elsevier, and served as its executive editor for many years afterward [3].
I am not going to try to list everything Larry did. Thirteen books, well over a hundred articles and editorials, four decades of lectures at medical schools and hospitals here and abroad, and a wall of awards. The full record is on his website at dosseydossey.com, and it is worth your time [3].
What I want to write about instead is what his work actually changed.
Where he stood.
By the time Larry started publishing, the research on consciousness, prayer, and healing already existed. What it did not have was a serious home. It was scattered, hard to find, and largely unpublishable in the venues that mattered for a medical career.
I was ten years old in 1980, so I want to be honest that I am not describing anything I witnessed. I am going on what people who were there have told me, and on the record they left behind.
What made Larry unusual is that he was completely conventional. He earned his MD from Southwestern Medical School in Dallas in 1967, served as a battalion surgeon in Vietnam where he was decorated for valor, co-founded the Dallas Diagnostic Association, and was Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital in 1982 [3]. He was not someone who had washed out of mainstream medicine and gone looking for something else. He asked his questions from inside the house.
He was also clear about where those questions came from. In his own words, “Almost all physicians possess a lavish list of strange happenings unexplainable by normal science”[3]. He had watched patients recover in ways his training could not account for, and he was not willing to file those cases away and forget about them.
What he did next is the part I most admire. He went to the literature. The through-line in all of his work was an insistent focus on what the data show [3]. He was not asking anyone to believe him. He was asking them to look.
He changed the language
Larry introduced the idea of nonlocal mind in “Recovering the Soul” in 1989, describing mind as unconfined to the brain and body [4]. Ten years later, “Reinventing Medicine” laid out the framework people still use in conversation today: Era I, mechanical medicine; Era II, mind-body medicine; Era III, nonlocal or shared consciousness [5].
You can argue with that map, and plenty of people did. But a map gives you somewhere to stand and something to point at. Whole conversations became possible because there was finally vocabulary for them, and I still hear that vocabulary used, almost thirty years on, by people who may not know where it came from.
He kept pushing. In 2013 he published “One Mind,” which took the idea as far as he was willing to take it: that our individual minds are not separate things at all, but part of a single infinite consciousness [6]. Erwin Schrodinger was one of his heroes in this. Schrodinger, drawing on Vedanta as much as on quantum physics, had concluded that mind is ultimately singular rather than plural, and Larry returned to him again and again.
One mind. Universal mind. Transcendent mind. He asked us to sit with those, not as doctrine and not as comfort, but as where he thought the evidence was pointing.
He changed what could be studied
Larry served as co-chairman of the Panel on Mind/Body Interventions at what was then the Office of Alternative Medicine at NIH, and later the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine [3]. That work happened at exactly the moment when the federal research agenda for this field was being written, and it happened while the office was small and fighting for its existence.
Mind-body intervention is a funded research category today. Trials on meditation, imagery, biofeedback, and the effects of intention are ordinary now. They were not ordinary then. Larry was not the only person who made that shift, but he was in those rooms early, when being in them cost something.
He changed what could be taught
This is the number that says the most to me. According to his own biography, when “Healing Words” was published in 1993, only three medical schools in the United States offered a course exploring religious practice and prayer in health. Nearly eighty do now, and many of them teach from his books [3].
Three to eighty. Whole generations of physicians have now been trained to take a spiritual history, to ask a patient what sustains them, to treat meaning as clinically relevant rather than as a soft aside. That is curriculum change, and curriculum change outlives all of us.
He changed the conversation outside of medicine
“Healing Words” became a New York Times bestseller in 1993 [7]. That mattered in a way we sometimes undervalue, because it put the actual research in the hands of ordinary readers, and then those readers walked into their physicians’ offices and asked about it.
A profession can ignore its own dissenters for a very long time. It has a much harder time ignoring its patients.
He changed things for nursing, too
I want to name this specifically, because it often gets left out.
Nursing recognized Larry early, well before medicine did. The Texas Nurses’ Association named him Health Professional of the Year in 1984, nearly a decade before “Healing Words.” In 1999 the American Association of Critical Care Nurses gave its Pioneering Spirit Award to Larry and Barbara together, one of six honors the two of them received jointly over the years [2,8].
That is not incidental. Nurses were already doing this work at the bedside, largely without permission and largely without language for it, and often in silence because of the pushback from administrators or other health providers. Larry, together with his extraordinary wife, the nurse visionary Barbara Dossey, one of nursing’s most formidable scholars, began to give nurses the framework, the language, and the safe space to change that [8]. The two of them worked that ground together for more than fifty years.
He built the infrastructure
I think founding “Alternative Therapies” may be the most consequential thing Larry ever did, and it is the thing people mention least.
A field does not really exist until it has somewhere to publish. Peer review, citations, an archive, something a young researcher can put on a CV without damaging their prospects. Larry built that in 1995, when no comparable venue existed, and much of what came afterward, including the journal you are reading, grew in the space he cleared. Then he did it again in 2005 with “EXPLORE.” That is a quarter century of showing up to edit other people’s work, which is the least glamorous and most generous thing a senior figure in any field can do with their time.
He was good at it, too. In 2000 the Western Publications Association gave him its Maggie Award for best signed editorial, for a piece called “War: A Vietnam Memoir” [2]. Thirty years after he came home from being a battalion surgeon, he was still working that out on the page, and doing it well enough to win a prize for it.
He gave people courage
This is the part that matters most to me, and I suspect to a lot of you.
I met Larry and Barbie when I was Education Director at AIHM. They would come together and speak at our conferences and their lectures were always standing room only. One year a very prominent integrative MD was up on stage telling his own story, and Larry was sitting right there in the front of the room. He stopped and thanked Larry in front of everyone, because it was Larry who had inspired him to go down this path in the first place.
There are so many of us who could tell some version of that story. Doctors who were about to quit and did not. Nurses who found a way to name what they had always known. Researchers who took on a question their department told them to leave alone. Patients who were finally acknowledged by a physician, not dismissed or vilified.
What I can tell you from my own experience is what he was like in a room. Larry had a presence about him, an energy. He was courage and light. That is the plainest way I know how to say it, and I think anyone who was ever in a room with him will know exactly what I mean.
There is something else the two of them did together that I think about a lot. Larry and Barbie created a safe space for people to articulate their own stories and their own experiences.
Think again about what Larry said, that almost every physician keeps a list of strange happenings that normal science cannot explain. He was right, and most of us keep that list to ourselves. Around Larry and Barbie, people opened it. Clinicians told them things they had never said out loud at work. Patients did too. That kind of safety is not a technique you can learn at a workshop. It comes from who a person is, and they both had it.
There are videos on their website of the two of them teaching, and I went back and watched some of them recently. What struck me is how simply they said all of it. Nonlocality. Immortality and eternality. Modern physics. The nature of space, time, and causality, and what those have to do with medicine. Larry said he had always been interested in consciousness and spirituality in health and healing, and at one point he put the whole of it into a single sentence: “Immortality and eternality are back on the table in modern medicine” [9].
Larry and Barbie were both twins, which I have always thought was a lovely thing to know about a man who spent forty years arguing that minds are not as separate as we assume they are. In my whole career I have never met a couple quite as extraordinary as them. Truly inspirations, both of them. I invite you to go and watch them if you have not. It is lovely to see the two of them work, and the insights are tremendous.
He led with the heart
For all of it, what I keep coming back to is his humility.
He talked about the heart, and he meant it structurally rather than sentimentally. He said that for him, following the heart is the essence of intuition and creativity and openness [10]. He was also hard on a reflex he saw in some skeptics and critics, who he felt closed their hearts in reaction to evidence that unsettled them. He thought that was lethal, and said it amounted to being a traitor to science.
That is a strong thing to say, and I think he meant it precisely. The obligation is to stay open to any sort of evidence, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. Closing down is the betrayal, not the looking.
The people he kept pointing us toward were the heart-centered mystics. Love, compassion, and profound caring. That is what he thought we should carry forward, and it is what I want to carry forward from him.
In the notice she posted for their community, Barbie wrote that Larry is free now, and that his soul resides “where the river meets the vast ocean of love.” She has asked for prayers for him during his transition, and I hope you will send them [1].
Larry was always a pioneer and just an amazing person, and he is going to be greatly missed by this whole community. Most of us never got the chance to thank him. This is mine.
In an interview about fifteen years ago, Larry said he believed we are moving toward a recognition of “the majesty of consciousness and its immortality” [10]. He thought we ought to be bold about saying so, because to his reading the evidence that it does not end with the death of the brain and the body was simply overwhelming. He was saying that fifteen years ago, and he never backed away from it.
I went back to those videos again after I heard the news. Even on a screen, even now, I felt a profound sense of peace and love. Whatever that was in him, it is still there.
So, Larry, I will see you on the other side. And may your journey into that majesty of consciousness be as brilliant, as humble, and as full of love and mystery as your journey here has been
A virtual celebration of Larry’s life will be held Saturday, September 5, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. MST at www.dosseydossey.com, and will be archived for anyone who cannot attend. A Memorial Guestbook is available at the same address.
Advances in Mind-Body Medicine welcomes remembrances from readers whose work was shaped by Larry Dossey. Correspondence may be sent to tparker@innovisionhm.com.
References
(1) Dossey B. Larry Dossey: September 27, 1940-August 25, 2026 [memorial notice]. DosseyDossey. Published August 2026. Accessed August 28, 2026. https://www.dosseydossey.com/
(2) Dossey, Larry 1940-. Encyclopedia.com. Accessed August 28, 2026. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/dossey-larry-1940
(3) Larry Dossey, MD. DosseyDossey. Accessed August 28, 2026. https://www.dosseydossey.com/larry-dossey-md
(4) Dossey L. Recovering the Soul. Bantam Books; 1989.
(5) Dossey L. Reinventing Medicine: Beyond Mind-Body to a New Era of Healing. HarperSanFrancisco; 1999.
(6) Dossey L. One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters. Hay House; 2013.
(7) Dossey L. Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine. HarperSanFrancisco; 1993.
(8)Barbara Dossey, PhD, RN. DosseyDossey. Accessed August 28, 2026. https://www.dosseydossey.com/barbara-dossey-phd-rn
(9) Dossey L. Interview. Paradigm Explorer. Accessed August 28, 2026. https://www.dosseydossey.com/larry-dossey-md
(10) Mace L. One mind, one consciousness: when spirituality meets science. Interview with Larry Dossey
. The Juicy Living Tour. Published [EXACT DATE FROM YOUTUBE]. Accessed August 28, 2026. https://youtu.be/aCFcyC5BUl0
By Tabatha Parker, ND, Editor in Chief of Advances in Mind Body Medicine
Leave a Reply