Healing EEs/EHEs/Healing Process Record Type: Review   ID: 530
A Different Kind of Healing: Doctors Speak Candidly About Their Successes With Alternative Medicine Janiger, Oscar, & Goldberg, Philip
Janiger is an experienced physician who, at the suggestion of publisher Jeremy Tarcher, polled 200 randomly selected doctors in the Los Angeles area and 50 more across the U.S. Their responses are quoted anonymously in this book, which Janiger calls "an oral history ... of an important transitional period in the history of Western medicine, from a prescribed and somewhat inflexible system to one that is more exploratory and open to different concepts and procedures" (p. 20). The work opens with a chapter on the evolution of modern medicine, which contains many anecdotes of how doctors discovered the value of unorthodox techniques. Chapter 2, "Recognizing the Power of the Mind," documents how doctors are coming to recognize the important role the mind plays in health and disease. The following chapter looks at the opposite—the ways in which physical/physiological factors affect mental health. Specific types of nontraditional healing described by the doctors polled are herbs and other folk remedies, foods/nutrition, touch, acupuncture, and homeopathy. A chapter is devoted to the connection between religion and healing, such as prayer, the zen of healing, paranormal diagnosis, and viewing disease as a spiritual lesson. Another chapter reviews the elements that promote resistance to change within medicine. Another interesting chapter presents the physician’s ideas about the future of medicine and ways in which medicine could/should change. As Janiger points out, although this book is an impressionistic account conveyed mainly by case histories and anecdotes, nonetheless "the material quoted was voiced by physicians with rigorous academic training and a good deal of clinical experience" (p. 20).
Publisher Information:	New York: Putnam's, 1993. 226p. Index: 218-224

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