A symposium on meditation, prayer and spiritual healing.

At the 2005 Kaiser Permanente National Primary Care Conference in Maui, I convened a distinguished panel, diverse in disciplines, to address the topic of meditation, prayer, and spiritual healing. The following symposium is an edited transcript of that session. Meditation in the form of a relaxation response was first brought to conventional medicine by Herbert Benson, a Harvard cardiologist in the 1970s. Prayer? Isn’t that something people do in church or on their knees by their bedside? Spiritual? Is that different from religion? How is it experienced now? Healing? The only reference to healing when I went to medical school was wound healing. Can meditation, prayer, and spiritual healing be part of clinical practice? And what are the outcomes of their use? This panel was brought together in Maui to illuminate the areas of mind, body, and spirit in clinical practice. We feel that this subject is so important that we are publishing it in this issue on health and healing. ❖