The Healing Power of Doing Good: The Health and Spiritual Benefits of Helping Others - Hardcover

Allan Luks; Peggy Payne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0449904512 ISBN 13: 9780449904510

Publisher: Fawcett, 1992

Synopsis

Reveals how helping others can be a euphoric experience dubbed the "Helper's High" and can counteract a volunteer's physical and emotional problems

About this title

About the Author:

Allan Luks, an internationally recognized health and social services leader, led the first research which linked the emotional and physical health benefits gained by those who regularly help others. He is also the author of Will America Sober Up?, You Are What You Drink, and the editor of Having Been There. He has initiated health promotion laws that have become national models and written extensively for newspapers and magazines.Peggy Payne is a writer whose articles appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Science Digest, Family Circle, McCalls, and many others. The author of a novel, Revelations, she lives in Chatham County, North Carolina.

From Library Journal:

It is widely accepted as fact that helping others--specifically strangers, not just family and friends--makes one feel good. Luks's purpose is to show exactly how one's physical health, not just emotional well-being, is improved through helping others. He writes about "helper's high," something akin to the phenomenon which runners experience from the release of endorphins. Actual accounts of how individuals have been healed through helping run throughout the book. Can holding abandoned babies really cure a backache? It seems so! Such caring might reduce the growing violence of our society, Luks proposes. The book ends with a list of and information about health organizations that encourage volunteers. Highly recommended.
- John Moryl, Yeshiva Univ. Lib., New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fawcett
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0449904512
• ISBN 13: 9780449904510
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 330