If you suffer form any form of cronic or autoimmune disease you need to read this book. Also very interesting for anyone wanting to know how to be healthy too!
A Much-needed Prescription for Modern Medicine
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 23 years ago
This book is, indeed, the second edition of the book originally entitled `The Four Pillars of Healing'. If you read that book, then you have read this one: the only differences (besides the lurid cover) seem to be a couple of new appendices and a change to an existing one, and an extensive questionnaire to discover one's mediators, antecedents, triggers, and effects (terms explained in the book). But, since the first edition came out in 1997 and this one in 1998, the references are still quite current.Basically, Dr. Galland is making the point that modern medicine has lost its way, and is now doing much damage in some cases, and little good in many others. Of course, this is a point rather stridently made by many authors advancing alternatives to the offerings of the medical establishment, such as meditation, acupuncture, herbal therapies, dietary supplements, and so on. Dr. Galland is sympathetic to many of these alternatives, but what is different about his approach is that he wishes to bring them into the fold, as it were, rather than break from the flock. He was trained as a physician in the usual way, a way he now feels is wrong, that modern medicine is expending much effort to solve the wrong problems.Healing sick people by observing them, interacting with them, and restoring their balance is the foundation of medical art, but somewhere in the 19th century that approach got displaced when microorganisms began to be associated with disease. It was a short step to claim that these microorganisms "caused" the disease - one germ, one disease. Before long a new type of doctor began to dominate medical care, the "specialist". Specialists were trained to think of a disease as an entity with characteristics that were independent of the person it happened to be afflicting. They specifically rejected the view that individual differences mattered, except in a very superficial way. They were emotionally and intellectually ill-equipped to deal with the messiness of real people whose internal ecologies and external circumstances actually determined whether they got sick, and how it showed up. Many people are infected with the TB bacillus, but only a few get TB. And so for so many other diseases.Dr. Galland believes that one's diet, exercise, habits, emotional life, physical environment, as well as one's intrinsic makeup and history (even one's developmental history in the womb!) should all be factored into any diagnosis, to interpret symptoms and suggest treatment. This he calls "patient-centered" diagnosis, to distinguish is from current practice, which might be called "disease-centered" diagnosis. He believes that many problems that are today attacked with a variety of over-the-counter and prescription drugs, or, more radically, with surgery, are really the result of imbalances in a person's life. Some of these, such as diet, are rather easily correctable, and simple changes in eating habits, perhaps with a course of diet supplements, can reverse the c
Same as Four Pillars of Healing
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 26 years ago
This book is the exactly the same as his previous book "The Four Pillars of Healing", just in paperback and with a new cover. You save a few bucks by getting this paperback edition.
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