The Immune Power Personality: Seven Traits You Can Develop to Stay Healthy

A groundbreaking program, based on the latest scientific research, describes seven traits associated with immunity, showing how to strengthen these traits to build up the mind-body connection for better health. 20,000 first printing. Tour.

Dreher (Your Defense Against Cancer), a proponent of the body-mind connection, suggests that adopting traits that are characteristic of healthy people can lead to improved health. He believes the pivotal psychological factor in illness is not stress itself but how we cope with stress. Drawing on research by psychologists and physicians who have explored mind-body relationships, Dreher offers seven key factors that appear to encourage an improved immune system and better health: the ACE Factor (the ability to attend, connect and express); the capacity to confide; hardiness; assertiveness; the power of love; helping others and self-complexity (having many interests). Dreher cites his own freedom from expected colds and flu resulting from his incorporating these traits into his own lifestyle. Although the mind-body connection still draws much skeptical response, readers may be inclined to experiment to see if a change in attitudes will make them feel better and strengthen their own resistance to disease.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Health and medicine writer Dreher promotes "a leap forward in mind-body medicine" that moves beyond stress reduction. He first chronicles the psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) breakthrough constituted by the discovery that brain chemicals in the bloodstream can alter the behavior of immune cells, then details the research of psychologist Gary Schwartz on the healing power of the "ACE factor" --that is, our capacity to Attend, Connect, and Express. Techniques such as meditation, biofeedback, and guided imagery, Dreher says, engender attention; record-keeping of symptoms can facilitate the opportunity to connect bodily manifestations with corresponding levels of being; a clear understanding of objectives can help people recognize symptoms, seek the best available treatment, procure emotional support from friends and family, and express sadness and anger. Tricked out with ACE exercises and case histories, Dreher's book makes a good case for this "harmony of balanced biochemistry." Whitney Scott