World Famous Comics: Spontaneous Healing : How to Discover and Embrace Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself
Spontaneous Healing : How to Discover and Embrace Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself
By: Andrew Weil Publisher: Ballantine Books Average Rating: Binding: Mass Market Paperback Label: Ballantine Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 384 Publication Date: April 04, 2000 Release Date: April 04, 2000
The body can heal itself. Spontaneous healing is not a miracle but a fact of biology--the result of the natural healing system that each one of us is born with. Drawing on fascinating case histories as well as medical techniques from around the world, Dr. Andrew Weil shows how spontaneous healing has worked to resolve life-threatening diseases, severe trauma, and chronic pain. Weil then outlines an eight-week program in which you'll discover:
- The truth about spontaneous healing and how it interacts with the mind - The foods, vitamins, supplements, and tonic herbs that will help you enhance your innate healing powers - Advice on how to avoid environmental toxins and reduce stress - The strengths and weaknesses of conventional and alternative treatments - Natural methods to ameliorate common kinds of illnesses And much more!
From the Author of Outstanding You Outstanding You: Discover, Design and Achieve Ultimate Fitness
A fantastic book about how to see the body from a whole new perspective. Dr. Weil is able to logically and clearly make strong connections between Western and "alternative" medicines in ways that make them easy to understand. I've read many of his books and without doubt, this is one of his best works. Look for his products at Origins....they are not tested on animals and his supplements are some of the finest around. Strongly recommended for anyone seeking excellent health and an opportunity to get and stay in shape.
Definitley worth reading!!!!! This book is certainly worth the time. I learned some amazing information from it and it certainly helped open my mind to alternatives. There is still a lot in life that science hasn't solved and there will always be things which we may not figure out. However, just because we don't fully understand them, that shouldn't stop us from using those alternatives.
Espontaneous Healing in Spanish... I would love very much to find Dr Weill's books, espetially Espontaneous Healing" in Español. I would buy a few copies!!!
A reasoned resource on a subject fraught with difficulty FULL DISCLOSURE - I have lymphoma and have been a patient of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for over three years, including a five month chemotherapy regimen.
Besides being the author of this book, which is sub-titled "How to Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself", who is Andrew Weil?
Well, he's a Harvard graduate (Botany) and Harvard medical school graduate, did an internship and then basically dropped out of the standard or orthodox medical field. Spent the next twenty years or so traipsing around the world talking with various shamans, Chinese herbalists, gurus, etc.
And he's gotten to be a very influential guy.
He has been a big proponent of natural therapies for the healing of maladies. While not opposed to allopathic or conventional medicine, Weil heavily criticizes the establishment for emphasizing "disease and it's treatment, rather than health and it's maintenance" (P. 65). He emphasizes natural healing and a variety of alternative therapies. In Weil's view, the body heals itself, it is a "healing system." And the healing system is a functional system, "not an assemblage of structures that can be neatly diagrammed" (P. 65).
Of course this is a point that has been noted by many people, and is obvious to anyone who thinks about it. If you get a cut, the cut heals itself. My son's currently broken ankle will mend itself; he has a cast on simply to protect the ankle from further damage. The cast doesn't heal the break. And the overwhelming opinion is that most cancers heal themselves; our immune system is constantly destroying abnormal cells before they get to any size or we know they are there.
Weil makes a point (P. 110) that "Treatment originates outside you. Healing comes from within."
The book is 280 pages long and divided into three parts. The first section is entitled "The Healing System" and is filled with stories and cases of people who were healed by alternative therapies. Herbs, acupuncture, aromatherapy, certain forms of classic osteopathic medicine, visualization, mind-body interactions, stuff like that.
The second and third sections are entitled "Optimizing the Healing System" - what to do to maintain good health - and "If you get sick". Weil lays out a variety of programs of preventive care. Much of it pretty basic like don't smoke and go for relaxing walks. And then stuff like using tonics and vitamins. The last section is a bit encyclopedic with short sections on various alternative approaches - Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Ayurvedic medicine, imagery and visualization therapy, chiropractic, on and on.
What about cancer? Weil points to the three standard therapies, surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, with strong reservations on the latter two. Too much of a bludgeon approach, with chemotherapy especially having possible deleterious effects on other body systems. He suggests that the ultimate "cure" for cancer will come when we figure out how to "turn on" the immune system to attack and destroy the cancer cells, which somehow escaped or inoculated themselves from the body's immune system. As mentioned above, the standard opinion now is that most cancers develop due to an immune system failure. I think his opinion on the ultimate cancer cure is pretty much the standard opinion in the conventional medical establishment.
Of course the whole problem with Weil's approaches - diet, herbs, aromatherapy, "healing touch", is that there is scarcely any real scientific evidence for the efficacy of any of these approaches. It's all anecdotal. Where are the double blind studies, the comparisons between groups - all the studies that can lend credence to the anecdotes?
Weil admits there aren't many studies, and urges the studies be done. And as one of my physicians said to me, "There are no scientific studies. On the other hand, 2,000 years of Traditional Chinese Medicine has to have something to it."
As you can imagine, Weil has some really strident critics in the medical fraternity. No sense going there in this review.
What do I think? Well, Weil is not just another New Age Wacko. Not that I'll be trading my Sloan Kettering doctors for aromatherapy any time soon. BUT I have started taking an immune system support capsule that Weil recommends (I figure it can't hurt - got it at Shoprite) as well as taking glucosamine chondroitin three times a day for my joints, rather then just the occasional pill.
A must read In Spontaneous Healing, Dr. Andrew Weil describes his revolutionary ideas for a new type of medicine, one that is desperately needed in our times. A medicine that works in conjuction with your body's natural healing ability, without the overliance on toxic drugs (which he maintains have their definite place, but are over-prescribed). A medicine that uses the healing power nature and one's lifestyle, including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health, and integrates the best of both western type allopathic and natural healing. Medical science needs to look past the Cartesian model of the human as a series of disjointed structures, (mind, body, etc), and begin to see it as the unifed whole that wants to (and can) heal, and live, and prosper. But to do so, it needs the right conditions, which include diet, lifestyle, outlook, environment, community, etc. Spontaneous Healing lays the groundwork for living that type of lifestyle.
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