The Power of Hope: A Doctor`s Perspective. This item is unavailable.The Power of Hope: A Doctor`s Perspective

In this book an eminent physician explores how patients and caring doctors can help lessen suffering when illness occurs. Dr. Howard Spiro urges that physicians focus on their patients’ feelings of pain and anxiety as well as on physical symptoms. He also suggests that patients and their doctors be receptive to the emotional relief that may be obtained from nature and from hope.

Drawing on his previous highly praised work on the doctor-patient relationship and the problem of pain, Dr. Spiro tells how people can be helped by a combination of alternative medicine and mainstream medicine―a treatment of mind, body, and spirit that energizes patients, strengthens their expectations, and starts them on the road to feeling better. In various forms of alternative medicine, from meditation to massage, from faith healing to folk medicine, from herbology to homeopathy, practitioners heed patients’ complaints and help them to help themselves. Dr. Spiro encourages physicians to talk and listen to their patients as much as they look and measure, to treat the whole patient and not just the disease, and to integrate a scientific approach to medicine with alternative approaches that may alleviate pain and suffering.

Howard Spiro, M.D., professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine and director of the Program for Humanities in Medicine there, established the gastrointestinal section at the Yale School of Medicine in 1955. He is the author of Clinical Gastroenterology, now in its fourth edition, and Doctors, Patients, and Placebos. He is coeditor of Empathy and the Practice of Medicine and Facing Death, both published by Yale University Press, and When Doctors Get Sick.