On Learning to Heal
or, What Medicine Doesn't Know
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- 20,99 €
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- 20,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this probing critique, Cohen (Talk on the Wilde Side), a women's, gender, and sexuality studies professor at Rutgers University, contemplates the limitations of Western medicine. Cohen suggests that "medicine's investments in knowing ‘what's wrong with us' and how to ‘fix it'" have limited patients' ability to conceptualize alternative forms of healing. He recounts almost dying from Crohn's disease in his early 20s and the unexplained phenomena he experienced during his hospitalization, including music-induced trances that lessened his pain and an unexpectedly successful recovery that caused his surgeon to remark, "I have no idea how you got better so quickly." Historical and philosophical excursions explore the birth of Western medicine, Michel Foucault's ideas about how medicine came to focus on biological (rather than supernatural) sources of disease, and the professionalization of the healing profession in the late 19th century. Cohen reflects on alternative healing methods he's tried and writes that tai chi awakened a "new kind of kinesthetic awareness in me" while movement classes' emphasis on process over achievement challenged Western medicine's insistence on measurable outcomes. Though the philosophy sometimes feels thrown it at random, the discussions are nonetheless incisive and will win over those wary of the outré considerations of the role "energy" plays in alternative healing. The searching questions raised are well worth considering.
