Healing and the Mind
-
- $23.99
-
- $23.99
Publisher Description
At last, the paperback edition of the monumental best-seller (almost half a million copies in print!) that has changed the way Americans think about sickness and health -- the companion volume to the landmark PBS series of the same name. In a remarkably short period of time, Bill Moyers's Healing And The Mind has become a touchstone, shaping the debate over alternative medical treatments and the role of the mind in illness and recovery in a way that few books have in recent memory. With almost half a million copies in print, it is already a classic -- the most widely read and influential book of its kind. In a series of fascinating interviews with world-renowned experts and laypeople alike, Bill Moyers explores the new mind/body medicine. Healing And The Mind shows how it is being practiced in the treatment of stress, chronic disease, and neonatal problems in several American hospitals; examines the chemical basis of emotions, and their potential for making us sick (and making us well); explores the fusion of traditional Chinese medicine with modern Western practices in contemporary China; and takes an up-close, personal look at alternative healing therapies, including a Massachusetts center that combines Eastern meditation and Western group therapy, and a California retreat for cancer patients who help each other even when a cure is impossible. Combining the incisive yet personal interview approach that made A World Of Ideas a feast for the mind and the provocative interplay of text and art that made The Power Of Myth a feast for the imagination, Healing And The Mind is a landmark work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intriguing companion volume to a PBS TV series, Moyers explores the roles of thoughts and emotions in illness and health through interviews with 16 doctors and scientists. He visits stress-reduction clinics and a cancer patients' support group, and he investigates the new field of psychoneuroimmunology, which emphasizes the importance of patients' attitudes to optimal immune-system functioning. He also travels to China to study acupuncture, therapeutic massage and chi gong , the manipulation of vital energy to ameliorate chronic neurologic and muscular diseases. Among those interviewed are University of California physician Dean Ornish, who has reversed heart disease in patients with treatments combining meditation, stress-reduction exercises, group therapy, walking and vegetarian diet; neurobiologist David Felten, discoverer of nerve fibers that link the nervous system to the immune system; and Thomas Delbanco of Harvard Medical School who seeks ways to transform the doctor-patient relationship so that patients are more actively involved. Color and black-and-white reproductions of art by Kathe Kollwitz, Rene Magritte, Norman Rockwell, Paul Klee and others interact suggestively with the text.
