Love and Survival : The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy

Rating:
Summary: A prescription for the heart!
Review: Dr. Dean Ornish's prescription for overall health and well-being includes a dose of diet, exercise, meditation, and communication. He first began formulating his Open Your Heart program while he was a medical student at Baylor college of Medicine in Texas in the 70's. He truly believes that heart disease can be reversed. In this new book he takes on "emotional and spiritual" issues.

His actual diet recommends avoiding all meats, avocados, olives, nuts, seeds, dairy products (other than egg whites and nonfat dairy products), sugar and simple sugar derivatives (honey, corn syrup, high fructose syrup), alcohol and coffee. He recommends eating beans, legumes, fruits, grains and vegetables.

The main reason he wrote Love & Survival was to show that love also has the power to heal. He doesn't believe we value love and relationships enough in our society. He says: "When you look at the scientific data, the need for love and intimacy is as important and basic as eating, breathing and sleeping."

Everyone knows love and intimacy are great, but not many people realize how important they are to our well-being and our basic survival. He recommends spending time with friends and family (and I recommend giving them all a hug every time you see them :).

He also recommends that we find a place where we can feel a connection to our community. I think Amazon is a great community, but he is talking about the real world. This could be a community center, a church or synagogue or anyplace where people meet on a regular basis, e.g. clubs, leagues, games. People who don't draw strength from their religious faith or are not a member of a group of people who meet on a regular basis have seven times the death rate, when compared to those that did. Now, that is something to think about if you want to extend your life.

Rating:
Summary: An Amazing book
Review: Dr. Ornish has rightly received international acclaim for his research and his publications about reversing heart disease. He has published three best selling books on this subject. He, as usual, is ahead of his field.

This book, Love and Survival, addresses the importance of the social side of heart disease. He outlines five main points about surviving heart disease without undergoing invasive medical procedures. These points are (from page 7): · Rediscovering inner sources of peace, joy, and well-being · Learning how to communicate in ways that enhanced (sic) intimacy with loved ones · Creating a healthy community of friends and loved ones · Developing more compassion and empathy for themselves and others · Experiencing directly the transcendent interconnectedness of life.

It is Dr. Ornish' reputation that compels us to buy this book. There are interesting points in the many studies he references, although a bit disjointed, nevertheless, the reader is informed and inspired.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: Dr. Ornish is best known for his research which showed the revolutionary result that diet and lifestyle changes
could lead to a reversal in the progression of heart disease. He has extended his body of work to highlight the
critical importance of social factors (relationships, community, friendship, support groups, lines of communication,
love) in both avoiding and recovering from life-threatening illness. He cites a large volume of scientific studies
which support his claims, and he divulges personal information about his own journey through life, shedding light
on his motivation and intentions. I highly recommend this book. It stands out in its class as unique and refreshingly
constructive.

Rating:
Summary: Scientific evidence of the power of love
Review: I had read Dr. Ornish's books about diet and health, and found them to be very helpful. Then, I read this one. This is by far the most important book that he has written, because how we handle our relationships with others is more important to our health than even what we eat and how we exercise. A little of this information was familiar to me from reading the New York Times Science section, but most of it was not. Clearly the biggest disease of our modern culture is our estrangement from each other. For most of history, we lived with others in small, intimate groups. Now that the population is much larger, we live in large groups with no close relationships. Even our families are losing that intimacy. This book puts the priorities back where they should be. Having close relationships with others comes first. This book is a blessing to us all. Thank you, Dr. Ornish! This book would be a great gift to everyone you care about on Valentine's Day.

Rating:
Summary: Points the way to better health and greater happiness.
Review: One of the biggest chapters in this book summarizes the studies showing how closeness to other people is good for your health. Ornish runs a clinic for people who have had a heart attack. And his clinic was the first to show that heart disease can actually be reversed. Doctors used to believe, up until very recently, that you can't reverse heart disease. You may be able to slow it down a little, but once your arteries were clogged, it was gospel that you couldn't unclog them. Ornish showed that you can. They use diet and exercise and...teaching people how to become closer to the people they love. And that increased closeness is a big part of the patient's improvement in health.

These men (usually) have a heart attack and their doctor tells them they don't have long to live. They're scared, of course. They come to Ornish's clinic and he tells them they need to learn to be close to people or they're going to die! For the first time in their lives, these men become interested in relationships!

I read Love and Survival right after reading the book, Brain Sex, where I discovered that men aren't naturally as interested in relationships as women. Even two- or three-day old babies show this difference. A female baby will look much longer at a human face than at an object. A baby boy is equally interested in objects and people. Extend that interest out over a lifetime and you have women whose lives are relationship-centered and men who don't have time for relationships because they're busy with other things. Then I read in Ornish's book what it takes for men to finally become interested in getting closer to people: The threat of death! So they get interested, and they improve their relationships, and they learn how to become close to people. Some time later they come back to Ornish and report that they are happier than they've ever been. Of course. We all know being close to people is the most important thing in the world and it's the one thing that can't be peeled away. When people are dying, on the battlefield or deathbed or in some survival situation, and they know they are going to die, the one thing people say is, "Tell my wife I love her." Or husband. Kids. The people who are close to you are what really matter. And getting close to them.

This book struck me like a revelation. I have been interested in how to get along with people and how to get people to like me and how to persuade people to my point of view, but I had never realized the value of really being close to people. I knew relationships were important but I had missed the point! This book has totally changed the way I've been interacting with people, and you know what? I've never been happier! Seriously.

Ornish gives you some good ideas about HOW to get closer to people. He gives you some practical steps to take. I'm the author of the book, Self-Help Stuff That Works, and I'll tell you something: Ornish's book contains quite a bit of stuff that works to bring you closer to the people you love.

Rating:
Summary: To Love and Be Loved....
Review: With this book, I have found another who spent the night in the Clinton White House. Previously, I reviewed YOU'RE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR NEXT ONE by Mike Medavoy, a movie producer, who with his wife Irene also had that honor. Basking in the success of his third book, STRESS, DIET AND YOUR HEART, reaching #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. And yet he felt unsatisfied, discontented and lonely. So much for success!

At the age of nineteen, he was clinically depressed and used his research into diet and heart disease to pull himself out the depths of despair. He met his sister's yoga teacher at a time when he needed direction and heard him proclaim, "Nothing can bring lasting peace, but you have it already if you just stop disturbing it. It is there always." So he decided he had nothing to lose and studied with this spiritual teacher, Sri Swami S., who also influenced him to switch to a vegetarian diet. "Discovering truth was one thing. Understanding it and integrating it into my life was another."

In 1984, twelve years later, he founded the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and was co-founder of the Center for Integrative Medicine in San Francisco (with Dr. Haile T. Debar and Lee Goldman, M.D., at the University of California School of Medicine). Dr. Dean Ornish was the first to prove the reversal of heart disease by changing lifestyles.

In this book, he promotes the theory that love and intimacy are powerful healing forces. Andrew Weil, author of SPONTANEOUS HEALING, describes this research effort as "enhancing wellness by attending to the nourishment of our real hearts." John Gray declares in glowing terms that Dean Ornish demonstrates the power of intimacy in healing. "Relationships bring freedom and joy": I think he's proven that in his own books.

Loneliness and isolation, aleination and depression increases the risks of heart disease, stroke, infectious diseases, even arthritis and ulcers. He feels that the real epidemic in today's culture is this emotional and spiritual 'heart' disease.

Love and intimacy are at a root of what makes us sick and what makes us well, what causes sadness and brings happiness, what makes us suffer and also leads to healing.

There is a time and place for drugs and surgery. Even when these are necessary, they are just the beginning. He counsels that we can then ask, "What can be learned from this experience? How did you get in this position? What can you do to help keep it from happening again?"

That which seems the most soft -- love, intimacy, and meaning -- is, in reality, the most powerful. He says that this part of his work is the least well understood, and perhaps the most important.

Emotional and spiritual heart disease is caused by the breakdown of social structures which used to provide us with a sense of connection and community. These profound feelings which increase our health problems are the "root of the illness, cynicism, and violence in our society."

Suffering of any kind can be a doorway for opening our hearts in ways that might not otherwise have occurred. I call this the demise of a caring family. A connection with family can influence your total health.

Many people nowadays walk around in varying degrees of chronic emotional pain. Perception is reality. I myself have suffered greatly from a chronic nerve pain since 1994. Being alone and feeling unloved (losing the one you do love) can bring on debilitating physical pain in many forms.

It has been proven that psychosocial intervention can significantly reduce anxiety, depression and pain. Having someone even just to talk with and hug reduces the pressure and could possibly prolong your life in addition to conventional medical care. Hostility, manifested by loneliness and isolation, caused by repressed anger, can lead to premature disease and death.

Lack of loving relationships compromise the immune system, causing those lacking social ties to be more prone to debilitating illnesses. Diversity of relationships was of major importance.

Believing that the world is a dangerous place helps to make it so in a self-fulfilling prophecy. How we perceive relationships can affect our health and our survival. How we view ourselves in relation to others is important, as we all have different life experiences based on our level of mistrust and suspicion.

There is a strong tendency toward selfishness, isolation and individualism in our society. We need to learn how to manage anxiety and deal with anger. The indivicualist orientation is a part of this country because of the sense of ego in American society. As the Constitution begins, "We the people..."

A romantic relationship is only one arena for commitment which deepens over time. You may commit to your child, job, friends, country -- to anything. We define ourselves by our commitments. And, we all need somebody to love. There are only four questions of value in life: What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love. (Mtn.Wings)

A Public televison series (PPS) was based on this book, and his audio book SIMPLE CHOICES, POWERFUL CHANGES is from the t.v. broadcasts with a Question & Answer session for each program. His latest book is about being overweight and how to go about losing some of those obnoxious pounds by eating properly and exercise -- something sadly lacking in today's obese people.