Patients with a spiritual component heal more quickly: Virginia Harris

Q: How have the responses been from the Indian doctors, nurses and health professionals you spoke with on your India tour this time?
A: I'm discovering that there is indeed a great spiritual interest emanating from the medical profession in this country. Every single audience I engaged with expressed keen interest on the connection between spirituality and healing. Many nurses wanted to share experiences of spiritual healing they've witnessed in patients and in their families, while many doctors wanted to know how to make a spiritual connect in their personal lives. I have to say that the spirituality quotient in India is as high as any country I've ever seen – and I am so pleased!

Q: How can modern medicine incorporate spirituality so that the two can work in tandem for healing?
A: Research shows that patients with a spiritual component in their lives heal more quickly, require less hospital stay if in for sugery and also less medicine than those without such a connection. When spiritually-inclined patients experience the results of recovery from their hospital stay, this helps deepen their spiritual practise even further and they have fewer visits to hospitals in the subsequent years, thus becoming empowered. It seems that a connection to a power that is larger, that is good, inspires a sense of hope, which from a medical perspective promotes healing. On the other hand, someone without a spiritual connect is cut off because they have no recourse. For them the 'God' is usually the doctor or the medicine.

Q: How would you view the fact that sometimes patients who have been declared medicially dead, return to life, often with a spiritual experience of Near-Death?
A: I can't speculate on someone else's experience but over 30 years ago I was involved in a near-fatal car crash. In the emergency room of the hospital the doctors gave up on my case, saying there was nothing further they could do to bring me back to life. I returned home in an ambulance and in the following week Christian Science healers came home to heal me with prayer, meditation and affirmations. Though there were several times during that week that I nearly died, that was the time I had a Near-Death experience of being sucked down towards a tunnel with a brilliant light at the end of it. Finally, I came back to life on earth and recovered. But that cosmic experience was so powerful even now and so vivid, that it changed the course of my life towards becoming a full-time Chrisitian Science practitioner.

Q: How do Christian Science and its founder Mary Baker Eddy define health?
A: Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) said "Health is not a condition of matter, but of Mind" and "Health is the absolute consciousness of harmony and of nothing else". This means that health equals wholeness, something which is not broken or fragmented. Sickness, on the other hand, is fragmented. At our Harvard symposiums on health we discovered that 60% to 90% of all medical cases seen by doctors are stress-related. So we're trying to bring spirituality forward. Prayer and meditation help to relieve stress. That's why spirituality is a good preventative.
On the other hand it has a curative function too. If one is faced with an illness, instead of dwelling on the problem – the dark side – turning towards the light, the hope, the power of God, can cure. I've seen scores of individual cases being cured in my own life. My grandmother was a Christian Science healer – and even medically 'impossible' cases have been restored to normalcy with the power of faith.