Radical Healing Book

Amazon.com Review Radical Healing: Integrating the World's Great Therapeutic Traditions to Create a New Transformative Medicine--the title sounds like an impossible undertaking. Yet Ballentine, an American physician and psychiatrist trained in many of the world's healing traditions, succeeds. He introduces the principles of holistic healing and presents an integrated system combining the awareness, tools, and practices taught by a variety of healing disciplines, including Ayurveda, homeopathy, and herbal medicine. Ballentine explains the principles of "nature's medicinals," based on the herbal traditions of China, India (Ayurvedic), Europe, and Native America. Recommendations include not just regular exercise and sound nutrition but also detoxification, meditation, massage, breath and energy work, as well as the use of homeopathic, herbal and flower remedies. Significantly, Ballentine concedes that few holistic techniques are currently effective against many life-threatening problems. His approach focuses on prevention and less-severe diseases, and the appendix covering alternative visions and treatments of 100 common illnesses omits AIDS, coronary disease and cancer entirely (a detailed bibliography does direct the reader to other sources, however). Ballentine provides an informative and practical guide, hampered only by his remarkably encyclopedic knowledge, which can interfere with the book's readability.