There's a change coming to the sick room

There's progress towards integration though. Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth already have a complementary centre for oncology that sits inside the cancer word, where massage, Reiki, reflexology are practiced.

Dr Bennett was as ready to talk about the benefits of prayer as she was meditation. She'd done some work with it through the Cancer Council.

Research focusing on the power of prayer in healing nearly doubled in the 1990s and continues today. Herbert Benson, MD has conducted his own studies on prayer, mainly focussing on the healing effects of meditation. He has documented on MRI brain scans the physical changes that take place in the body when someone meditates.

"Distant prayer" is prayer geared toward doing something – interrupting a heart attack or accomplishing healing", said Dr Mitchell Krucoff, associate professor of medicine in cardiology at Duke University Medical Centre, in an interview for WebMD a few years ago.

In the pilot study, the patients were assigned to a control group or to touch therapy, stress relaxation, imagery, or distant prayer. A therapist came to the bedsides of patients in the touch, stress-relaxation and imagery groups, but not the bedsides in the control or distant-prayer groups. People in those two groups didn't know whether prayers were being sent their way or not.

Those early results "were very suggestive that there may be a benefit to these [prayer] therapies", Krucoff explained as he launched into the trial's second phase with 1,500 patients undergoing angioplasty. "We're not looking at prayer as an alternative to angioplasty," he adds. "We're very high-tech people here. We're looking at whether in all of the energy and interest we have put into systematic investigation of high-tech medicine, if we have actually missed the boat. Have we ignored the rest of the human being – the need for something more – that could make all the high-tech stuff work better?"

Dr Bennett would concur. However, she did emphasise that unlike her genetics research, bringing spirituality into the medical curriculum will be more difficult … "will need more evidence almost than perhaps other areas that just don't need much justification. You'll need to understand the mechanism and everything that goes with it, whereas we don't understand the mechanisms for a lot of our drug therapies."

The mechanism, or biochemical interaction, in regard to meditation is now being studied and recorded. Helpful as that will be to the inclusion of spirituality into the curricula of medical schools throughout Australia, the benefits will be seen more in the associated advantages for both patients and staff.

We're beginning to look beyond what is visible to find not just a psychological cause for sickness, but also identifying and fulfilling a spiritual need. When speaking of the affect of contemplative and affirmative prayer, an early mind-body researcher and thought leader explained, "Its pharmacy is moral, and its medicine is intellectual and spiritual, though used for physical healing."

Spirituality, emphasising the healing of the whole person not just the disease, promotes trust in a higher power and often results in a more buoyant disposition, self-forgiveness, self-forgetfulness, a sense of peace and certainty, hope, optimism, increased kindness and compassion, along with a decrease in pain and depression. With other complementary therapies, it is often practiced in an environment free from harmful side-effects

By all accounts, we could be seeing a transformation in how we do medicine in the next 10 or 20 years. There's a change coming to the sick room.