Natural Health, Natural Medicine: A Comprehensive Manual for Wellness and Self-Care - Hardcover

Weil, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395493404 ISBN 13: 9780395493403

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990

Synopsis

A physician demonstrates how to take an active role in preventive health care--learning how to eat, exercise, and relax, use vitamins, herbs, and supplements, and maintain the immune system

About this title

Review:

Health can be defined in any number of ways, from the simple fact that you're not lying on a hospital bed to an overall sense of well-being and connectedness. One person may not feel healthy unless he's carrying around mounds of gym-built muscle, while another doesn't feel healthy unless she's eating an intestine-scrubbing macrobiotic diet and practicing an hour of yoga each day.

Dr. Andrew Weil looks at every aspect of health in Natural Health, Natural Medicine. He's quite cynical about bodybuilding and the emphasis on protein in our diets, while making a strong case for paying more attention to the way we breathe and the degree to which we interact with family, community, and nature. An interesting--but, unfortunately, short--section on loving says that most people have no idea what to do when they fall out of romantic love with a partner, which helps explain the high divorce rate.

Other sections of the book focus on healthy self-care practices ("nasal douching" is recommended for sinus sufferers), supplements (he believes most benefits that seem to come from these are placebo responses), and natural home remedies for an A-to-Z list of problems (the section on depression states that people experience low mood because they constantly seek highs; eliminate the quest for highs, and you eliminate the rebound experience of lows).

Many regard this book as the bible of natural healing; but even those who are on the fence about alternative medicine should find it to be an entertaining, informative, and highly opinionated beginner's guide to achieving better health without conventional medicine. --Lou Schuler

About the Author:

Andrew Weil, M.D., has degrees in biology and medicine from Harvard University. Author of the best-selling Spontaneous Healing and Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, he traveled the world experiencing and studying healers and healing systems and has earned an international reputation as an expert on alternative medicine, mind-body interactions, and medical botany. He is the associate director of the Division of Social Perspectives in Medicine and the director of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0395493404
• ISBN 13: 9780395493403
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 356