Browse Topics
Alternative Medicine
The Reach Of The Mind
An Interview With Larry Dossey
What really knocked my socks off was a study that I first found out about in 1987. It showed that people in coronary-care units who were prayed for did a lot better than people who weren’t.
December 1994Pine Boards & Strawberries
Finding Courage At A Cancer Workshop
As the end of my chemotherapy treatments approached, they became more and more difficult to endure. Freedom was so near, I could hardly bear to wait for it another second.
October 1994An Unbelievable Illness
There’s a lot wrong with me. Researchers in Maryland have cultivated several viruses from my blood and spinal fluid, revealing that those viruses are rampant in my body. My body’s immune system flails away at them without success.
September 1992Altered States
An Interview On Shamanism With Leslie Gray
I teach shamanic techniques which enable clients to have access to parts of their consciousness that they ordinarily can’t reach, and that’s what does the healing. I show them how to journey, and how to find a power animal or guardian spirit so that they can develop a relationship with these entities to empower themselves. Then they can do whatever they want to do: lose weight, work on a stuck relationship, heal their dispiritedness or negativity.
March 1988Cancer Is The Answer
Cancer, which had begun to affect as many as one in four, was a disease whereby an essentially weak, immature, dysfunctional cell invaded and occupied surrounding territories, dislocating the inhabitants, destroying the territory, devouring the resources, providing no exchange whatsoever until the entire territory was devastated and the inhabitants died of starvation, suffocation or toxicity. This dread disease became endemic to the second half of the twentieth century as tuberculosis had been in Europe in the nineteenth, and the plague earlier. Ironically, cancer, which perfectly mirrored imperialism, became through its proliferation the agency of spiritual and social — and therefore political — conversion.
January 1985The Doctor Who Won’t Charge
An Interview With Patch Adams
People are not their diseases. They are the same weak fragile beings that we ourselves are. Traditionally, a physician in general practice follows patients throughout their lives, but without touching on the quality of a person’s life, their loves, concerns, and fears, we ignore a gigantic area of resource and of disease.
August 1984The Green Woman
A hush fell between us now that almost had a thickness to it. It was like the moment when you drop a stone down a well and wait for the sound of its striking.
December 1983Gently Changing
An Interview On Cancer And Health With O. Carl Simonton
What we have our patients do is to take the symptoms of cancer as the illness, and to look for the five biggest changes that they can identify in their lives in the 18 months prior to the diagnosis being made. If they have had subsequent flareups, they look at the six months prior to each flareup. Then, they look at their emotional reactions to those changes. Finally, with each episode, they look at five good things that happened to them as a result of the diagnosis or of each flareup — what they get out of being sick.
November 1982Birdseye
We know something at the same time — we need to get out quick, Hal is already out, and Chuck is out on the other side, Anne and I are scrambling out, then we’re in the middle of the road in a little group, all looking at the illuminated bird. As the bird stands still in the air, I get an old ecstatic feeling of being overcome.
August 1981Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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