HOW CAN I HEAL WHAT HURTS?

An M.D./"wholistic psychiatrist" promotes Complementary/Alternative Medicine (CAM), a broad term encompassing a variety of self-healing approaches.

Benor prescribes mixtures of relaxation, meditation, imagery, journaling, fitness and proper diet to conquer numerous disorders. He contends that CAM therapists can enhance those self-healing techniques through acupuncture, homeopathy, massage and other methods rejected by many conventional physicians–methods that are often highly effective and free of side effects. Benor avoids open criticism of conventional practitioners, and he concedes that he stuck with conventional medicine for nearly 20 years of psychiatric practice. The shift occurred in 1980, when, he says, “I observed a physical change under a healer’s hand which completely convinced me this is a potent and valuable therapy.” Immediately, he addresses the common argument leveled against CAM practitioners, the placebo effect: “The placebo effect is actually a manifestation of the enormous self-healing abilities you have to alter your own states of health and illness. Self-healing can be activated intentionally or unconsciously by caregivers or by people working to heal themselves.” When he moves from the mind-over-matter prescription to bioenergies, the concepts may become murky for those unfamiliar with alternative medicine, and grasping the root argument that “the body consists of energy as well as matter,” harmonizing biological energy patterns for healing purposes, could require cerebral readjustments. This particular volume is specifically termed the “popular edition” of Benor’s oeuvre (Spiritual Healing: Scientific Validation of A Healing Revolution, 2001; Consciousness, Bioenergy and Healing: Self-Healing and Energy Medicine for the 21st Century, 2004), which lends a sense of accessibility to this weighty tome. After covering more than a dozen self-healing realms enhanced by CAM therapies, Benor turns to “the human energy field” in Chapter 3 and “Geobiological Effects” in Chapter 4, and the final chapter prescribes handy exercises for self-healing.

Intriguing concepts of medical care requiring new vocabulary and offering fresh channels of deep thinking.