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Summary: Alternative Guide to Health
Review: This bestselling book emphasizes the need to incorporate alternative medicine into current medical practices. Spontaneous Healing decribes a "healing system" that makes use of components of recognized systems of the body, including the immune, nervous, endocrine, and circulatory, to reveal how the body can heal itself and how those who are inflicted can enhance that healing. Dr. Weil asserts that the body has within it a healing system, responsible not only for remissions of life-threatening diseases but also for day-to-day maintenance and for positive responses to everyday illnesses
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Summary: comprehensive guidelines for activating your healing system.
Review: This book gives complete guidelines for
preventing illness, even a week-to-week
guide for changing habits. The book also
covers what to do if you do become ill.
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Summary: Wonderfully Informative
Review: This book has a wealth of information that benefit anyone who reads it. It makes a great tool for reasearch.
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Summary: Natural healing is in all of us! - A way to discover it!!!!!
Review: This book is amazing!! Personally being on many types of conventional medicines, I found this book to be very enlightening in the many ways to heal your body...naturally and safely! It's an extremely easy read and Dr. Weil explains everything in careful detail. After reading this, I am changing the way i view my body and mind and i'm passing this knowledge onto my friends. i reccomend this book HIGHLY to anyone who is seeking an alternative to conventional medicine.
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Summary: Being your own doctor
Review: This uplifting book desribes very well when alternative medicine can be an option, e.g. for allergies and stomach problems and when it isn't such a good idea, e.g. when one has operable cancer or a serious bacterial infection. This, I believe, gives this book high credibility. It combines the best of worlds and focuses on the ability of self-healing that can be enhanced by, for instance, better living, a change of attitude, new eating habits and learning hos to breath right. I became very interested in finding out more about visualization therapy, something that Weil strongly recommends trying, but in Stockholm where I live, I haven't been able to find a therapist in this field. The book includes lots of "things to try" or advice you might call it. These things have made me more observant of my body and mind, my breathing and how I feel. I might add that I am not exactly sick, but stressed a lot and find it difficult to relax. I have problems saying no and always feel pressure at work that I should be getting more things done. My interest for alternative medicine started when I started seeing a homeopath that has done wonders for my immune system. I used to get sick all the time and that has changed. I don't know what I would think of this book if I had a serious disease. One very good idea of Dr Weils for sick patients is trying to connect them with people that have survived similar illnesses. I myself would like to discuss my everyday problems with people that experience the same thing and have found a solution or a way to live a more relaxed life. I have recommended this book to several people already.
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Summary: Weil is a Pioneer
Review: This was book that really put Andrew Weil on the map and public speaker circuit and it was totally deserved. A wonderful mix of Weil's personal journey of being disaffected with the medical system, his travels abroad to look for answers he could only find at home, stories of patients that taught him key concepts about the body's inherent capacity to heal itself, and discussion of herbal and mind/body research that has influenced his work are only some of the main concepts he expounds upon in this volume. The main crux of the book is short and sweet: the body can heal itself because it is a healing system. Weil links the lack of doctor's belief in this healing system directly to their education. Medical students work in teaching hospitals populated by patients who represent only one end of the total spectrum of illness - the very sick. Since in this group healing responses occur less frequently than in the general population, doctors develop pessimistic attitudes that are applied across the board to all seen patients in their practice and often these attitudes are conveyed through thoughtless remarks that are the equivalent of a "medical curse". These powerful words expressing little optimism for healing are often internalized by the patient (although a chosen few will rebel and fight against them just to prove the doctor wrong) and rob the patient of belief in their own capacity to respond to their illness. Building on these concepts, Weil describes several of his patients and friends who, against traditional medical odds, have undergone "unexplained" spontaneous healing often from life-threatening conditions. In almost all cases, acceptance of the illness rather than struggle characterized a key part of the healing process and indicated a mental shift that Weil believes can initiate a transformation of the personality with it a healing of the disease. It's a relief for anyone finding hope for the medical profession while reading this book that Weil has begun a revolutionary medical school program in his home state of Arizona that begins to incorporate many of the "radical" ideas found in this book. This is a medical volume that should be on everyone's shelf.
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Summary: Weil is a Pioneer
Review: This was book that really put Andrew Weil on the map and public speaker circuit and it was totally deserved. A wonderful mix of Weil's personal journey of being disaffected with the medical system, his travels abroad to look for answers he could only find at home, stories of patients that taught him key concepts about the body's inherent capacity to heal itself, and discussion of herbal and mind/body research that has influenced his work are only some of the main concepts he expounds upon in this volume. The main crux of the book is short and sweet: the body can heal itself because it is a healing system. Weil links the lack of doctor's belief in this healing system directly to their education. Medical students work in teaching hospitals populated by patients who represent only one end of the total spectrum of illness - the very sick. Since in this group healing responses occur less frequently than in the general population, doctors develop pessimistic attitudes that are applied across the board to all seen patients in their practice and often these attitudes are conveyed through thoughtless remarks that are the equivalent of a "medical curse". These powerful words expressing little optimism for healing are often internalized by the patient (although a chosen few will rebel and fight against them just to prove the doctor wrong) and rob the patient of belief in their own capacity to respond to their illness. Building on these concepts, Weil describes several of his patients and friends who, against traditional medical odds, have undergone "unexplained" spontaneous healing often from life-threatening conditions. In almost all cases, acceptance of the illness rather than struggle characterized a key part of the healing process and indicated a mental shift that Weil believes can initiate a transformation of the personality with it a healing of the disease. It's a relief for anyone finding hope for the medical profession while reading this book that Weil has begun a revolutionary medical school program in his home state of Arizona that begins to incorporate many of the "radical" ideas found in this book. This is a medical volume that should be on everyone's shelf.
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Summary: Maybe now America will see their doctors are not gods!
Review: Though one may not agree with all of the healing methods presented by Dr. Weil, you must give him a standing ovation for his courage in standing up to the medical profession in general. He shows the human and fallible qualities of our doctors and their inability to diagnose all human disease or their outcomes.
For years I, and many like myself, have searched in vain for a doctor who had the courage to admit their shortcomings and limitations. Dr. Weil points out to all of America the need to be involved in and take an active role in their health and well being.
Reading this book it is evident that Dr. Weil is not on a witch-hunt to come against all doctors, rather he is pointing out the problems we should have seen coming in America for a long time. The medical sciences concentrate solely on symptom eradication using drug therapy instead of the holistic approach to staying well by stimulating our own immunity fighting capabilities. Is it any wonder we ended up where we are now in this country, behind the medical times?
Common sense should tell us when wounds heal up on our bodies that we have a built in healing system, when stimulated properly, it can keep us in optimum health.
Dr. Weil points out we should not discard all of the modern medical advancements but we need to incorporate more natural healing methods which as he points out are less invasive to our systems and help to promote natural healing.
This was an excellent book if for nothing else it gave all of America a slap in the face to wake up and smell the "pharmaceutical" coffee brewing. (America continues to lag in wellness while the drug companies make billions) Thanks Dr. Weil for helping to bring to light the problems that many of us have known were there and unable to get "well America" and many in the standard medical profession to listen to.
Three different doctors told me that I suffered from hypothyroidism and my thyroid would never produce normally again. I was told "there is nothing you can do naturally to get well" and " I should just get used to taking my medicine for the rest of my life". As of December 1996, five years after my inital diagnosis, my thyroid test showed my thyroid is working again. Working again not because of the three "standard" doctors, or standard treatment. There was "one" doctor who let me take an active role in the "natural" healing processes. He listened to me say I wanted to get well and with natural supplements, eating right and along with exercise, I am now back on the right track.
No need to convince me Dr. Weil that what your saying is true, now hopefully the rest of America will take heed as well
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Summary: Spontaneous Healing is a medical bible.
Review: Weil's "Spontaneous Healing" discusses the power of natural medicine and the spirit over certain medical practices. The author presents powerful testimonials from patients who have conquered their illnesses with their own techniques. The book also present a guide to various illnesses, including cancer and AIDs, as well as a glossary of natural remedies. You will not only read this book once, you will refer to it throughout your life.
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Summary: Wonderful and Inspirational... with a caveat...
Review: Weill's book inspires by relating personal stories about the successes people have had in healing themselves. Rather than apologizing for being anecdotal, Weill urges us to find the deeper message in these stories, namely, that your mind and body can work together to get and stay well.
The caveat I would offer here, however, is that I think his nutritional advice, offered later in the book, is not well thought out. He would have you virtually eliminate protein from the diet, largely because he disapproves of the typical sources of protein in the American diet. Clearly this is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, especially in light of how the high-carbohydrate diets we all thought were so good for us in the 80's are now coming into question. I think there is more sound nutritional advice to be had elsewhere.
Still, READ this book!
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