HEALTH, HOPE, AND HEALING

In search of health and self-realization, Tate makes Shirley MacLaine look like a piker as he samples a groaning smorgasbord of New Age healing techniques and philosophies. It started during a recurrence of Hodgkin's disease, when a voice told Tare, ""You must know you are cured now,"" and that he would ""find the means of survival."" Although Tare continued chemotherapy treatment, he banished negative thoughts and worked to overcome fear and anger. The cancer went into remission, but his quest continued. A course in Silva Mind Control conditioning (a relaxation technique that purportedly harnesses the ""extrasensory power"" of the brain's alpha waves) enabled him to diagnose his own health and that of strangers. In short order, he began using psychic Edgar Cayce's remedies for Hodgkin's disease, undergoing deep acupuncture in London, attending psychic healing services at a Baltimore church, and communing with ""spirit guides"" via a spiritualist church, and so on and on. Tate abandoned his law career to pursue an unfulfilled desire to become a psychotherapist via training at California's John F. Kennedy Univ., where, among other things, he studied Zen, bioenergetics, Rolfing, tai chi, and Christian mysticism. Anticlimactically, he suffered a heart attack, treated by standard medical methods. More self-involvement than reader enlightenment. Bernie Siegel's Love, Medicine and Miracles is still the holistic health champ.