Natural Health, Natural Medicine: The Complete Guide to Wellness and Self-Care for Optimum Health - Softcover

Andrew Weil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618479031 ISBN 13: 9780618479030

Publisher: Harvest, 2004

Synopsis

The bible of natural medicine--(Larry Dossey, M.D.), Natural Health, Natural Medicine is a comprehensive resource for everything you need to know to maintain optimum health and treat common ailments. This landmark book incorporates Dr. Weil's theories of preventive health maintenance and alternative healing into one extremely useful and readable reference, featuring general diet and nutrition information as well as simple recipes, answers to readers' most pressing questions, a catalogue of home remedies, invaluable resources, and hundreds of practical tips. This new edition includes up-to-the-minute scientific findings and has been expanded to provide trustworthy advice about low-carb diets, hormone replacement therapy, Alzheimer's, attention deficit disorder, reflux disease, autism, type 2 diabetes, erectile dysfunction, the flu, and much more.

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: Harvest
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0618479031
• ISBN 13: 9780618479030
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448