Healing Moves : How to Cure, Relieve, and Prevent Common Ailments with Exercise

In this groundbreaking book, two experts, a renowned cardiologist and an award-winning health columnist, show readers specific new strategies for taking advantage of a low-risk, low-cost, extremely effective, and readily available form of healing -- physical activity. The National Institute on Aging reports that "if exercise could be packed in a pill, it would be the single most widely prescribed, and beneficial, medicine in the nation." We know that physical activity is effective prevention, but pioneering research shows that it can also treat -- and even reverse -- America's top killers, often more effectively than drugs or surgery.

Drawing from Eastern as well as Western traditions, the authors explain how specific exercises can be powerful therapy for such life-threatening ailments as heart disease, cancer, stroke, pulmonary disease, and osteoporosis, as well as conditions that affect quality of life, including arthritis, back pain, asthma, depression, diabetes, stress, PMS, sexual dysfunction, high cholesterol, and carpal tunnel syndrome. The book's informative text is complemented by more than one hundred detailed illustrations that include yoga, qi gong, and various stretching and strength-building techniques. Whatever your age or fitness level, Healing Moves can help create a sense of well-being that can spill over into every aspect of daily life.

Carol Krucoff is a science writer and health columnist for the Washington Post.

Mitchell Krucoff, M.D., is a senior staff cardiologist and the director of the Ischemia Monitoring Laboratory at Duke University Medical Center. The Krucoffs live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.