MANIFESTO FOR A NEW MEDICINE
A Book Review

Your Guide to Healing Partnerships and the Wise Use of Alternative Therapies
by JAMES S. GORDON (Addison-Wesley, 1996)
Reviewed by Karen Wesolowski

How do you choose to heal, to live? What kind of a medical system would you like to be part of? Medical pioneer James Gordon invites readers to join in a personal and collective transformation of the entire medical enterprise-from our relationships to our bodies, to hospitals, medical schools, and research. Drawing on experience as a private practitioner, Gordon, a Harvard-trained professor at a leading medical school, director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, and advisory council chairman of the NIH's Office of Alternative Medicine, weaves together patients' stories, the history of modern medicine, and his own healing journey.

The book overviews various modalities -- nutrition, meditation, yoga, chiropractic, homeopathy, acupuncture, prayer, and the power of healing communities-and articulates a vision of compassion, wisdom, and common sense treating "whole people in their total environments," and facilitating patients' innate healing abilities. Primary care is seen as self-care; the doctor-patient dyad becomes a true healing partnership.

I loaned Gordon's book to a young woman undergoing treatment for a rare condition with costly experimental drugs. After reading it, she told her specialist that this treatment was not for her. The surprised specialist sought another opinion. The major symptom, it turned out, was not caused by her rare condition, but by a bowel problem treatable with a simple fiber supplement. She was relieved from debilitating side effects and regained her dignity and sense of self.

Help continue the new medicine revolution. Read this book and pass it on.

Karen Wesolowski is executive director of the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER) at the Center for Psychology and Social Change in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Copyright © 1996. The Light Party.