Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance: Your Body’s Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself Weil M.D., Andrew

Description

Product Description
One of the most authoritative and important voices on health and healing today presents a powerful new concept–that the body has within it a healing system, responsible not only for remissions of life-threatening diseases but also for day-to-day maintenance and for positive responses to everyday illnesses.
From Publishers Weekly
As others argue the politics of health care, Weil (Health and Healing) turns away from the usual practice of Western medicine, which is focused on alleviating symptoms rather than strengthening internal mechanisms of health, to closely consider the nature of the healing process. “At every level of biological organization, from DNA up,” he writes, the “mechanics of self-diagnosis, self-repair and regeneration exist in us.” To buttress his point, he cites such evidence as the placebo effect, inexplicable remissions and the commonplace repair of wounds, often marginalized by the medical community. In an effort to make the process of healing seem less obscure, Weil reports a wide range of dramatic case histories. Other sections detail various means, e.g., diet and breathing exercises, available for optimizing one’s healing system, and suggestions for approaches to illnesses. Also included are an “Eight Week Program for Optimal Healing Power” and a guide to finding practitioners, supplies and information.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Arizona doctor Weil leads the movement to combine alternative forms of medicine with standard treatment.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Weil, the Harvard-trained physician who has become the most articulate and persuasive advocate of holistic medicine, here recirculates the kind of advice he has previously vended (in how-to’s such as
Natural Health, Natural Medicine [1990]) for keeping yourself healthy and making the right decisions when you are injured or sick. But before he does those things–more readably and personably than anyone else–in the second and third parts of this book, he weighs in on its animating subject: the phenomenon of “miraculous” (that is, inexplicable by Western medicine) recoveries from illness. Weil believes such healings in defiance of physicianly business-as-usual should be taken far more seriously than they are. If we attend closely and open-mindedly to the traditions and practices by which such “miracles” are so often effected, Weil thinks we may learn how to make spontaneous healing, as Western medicine often bewilderedly calls the good outcomes of non-Western therapies, happen regularly for many more than now experience it. Maybe we’ll learn that such healing is entirely natural. Plenty of case histories, excellently reported, flesh out Weil’s argument and make it fascinating.
Ray Olson
From the Inside Flap
One of the most authoritative and important voices on health and healing today presents a powerful new concept–that the body has within it a healing system, responsible not only for remissions of life-threatening diseases but also for day-to-day maintenance and for positive responses to everyday illnesses.
About the Author
Andrew Weil, M.D., has worked for the National Institute of Mental Health and was for fifteen years a Research Associate in Ethnopharmacology at the Harvard Botanical Museum.