The Many Voices of Healing
What elements in healing can a cancer surgeon, a Pomo Indian medicine man, a psychic healer and a Rabbi all agree on? While there are hundreds of approaches to wellness, almost every heathcare profession now recognizes the need for compassion, optimism, faith, and human contact as a powerful catalyst for health.
Citing dozens of studies, and written from the perspective of many different specialties, a new book collects the best wisdom of our culture into a series of short essays that illuminate the essence of healing. The Heart of Healing (Elite Books, September 2004, http://www.NewHealer.com) assembles some of the most well-known and respected names in healing, including Dean Ornish, M.D., Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., Andrew Weil, M.D., Bernie Siegel, M.D., and Deepak Chopra, M.D. It also introduces a host of new voices, including Andrew Vidich, Ph.D., a theologian who writes about the spiritual basis of all healing and coins the term “theocentric medicine”; shaman and burgeoning new author Sandra Ingerman, who has published scientific studies showing that shamanic techniques can clean up polluted water, and Bob Dozor, M.D., a family doctor imaginatively battling to sustain his integrated treatment clinic in the midst of a drug- and HMO-dominated culture.
These are just a few of the thirty-two professionals who speak from their hearts about their most profound insights about healing. They passionately insist on the need to see human beings as a whole system of spirit, mind, heart and body, and point out that a therapeutic intervention on any level will affect the whole. They stress the urgency of bringing human values such as touch, emotional intimacy, respect and humility back into the medical model. Yet many of them are scientists, and respect for science, research and objective study permeates the book. The editor of The Heart of Healing, award-winning writer Dawson Church says, “Most of the authors in this book are medical doctors. When I edited a similar book fifteen years ago, only a quarter were M.D.s. Ideas that were radical back then have entered the mainstream. I predict that they are in the process of becoming the mainstream.”
For readers looking for the latest approaches to support their own wellness, as well as for those who want a peek at what the future of medicine might look like, The Heart of Healing makes compelling reading.
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