The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things

Fourteen Natural Steps to Health and Happiness

This book can transform our view of what health is all about, whether our concern is cancer or the common cold.

Drugs, transplants, and surgery don't work for 90 percent of our aches and pains and, while we are grateful for life-saving developments, we know that most come with risks that we ignore at our peril.

Every day modern medicine announces the arrival of yet another "wonder drug" or "miracle procedure" to a world increasingly wary of expensive high-tech cures.

Long hailed as one of the founding fathers of mind-body medicine, Larry Dossey directs our attention to simple sources of healing that have been available for centuries—treasures often hidden in plain sight—from the power of optimism and of tears to speed recovery to the surprising usefulness of dirt and bugs in curing disease and infection to the benefits of doing nothing.

Exploring the medical research that validates these simple remedies, Dossey encourages us to align ourselves with the wisdom of nature and allow true healing to take place.

Dimensions: 8" x 5.3"
Details: Paperback, 305 pages
Author: Larry Dossey

Testimonials

Holistic physician Dossey examines the potential power of 14 readily accessible sources of well-being, providing a strong case for utilizing such remedies before more extreme measures. His expansive discourse on optimism, forgetting, music, miracles, plants, risk taking and other "simple" things makes clear that, while these are hardly "simple" when fully appreciated, often they are undervalued or completely ignored by the mainstream medical community, which turns to high-tech procedures and worst-case scenarios as a first resort. According to Dossey (Reinventing Medicine), a nearly single-minded clinical focus has obscured patients' interpretation of their own experiences, leaving out important clues about how people heal. He provides numerous examples of those who have discovered "spontaneous healing," which most physicians discount or downplay because they defy explanation. Despite the title, this is not a step-by-step guide to accessing the healing power of home remedies. Instead, Dossey takes readers on a poetic, well-researched journey into the many paradoxes that are inherent in the human condition and how they relate to healing the body, mind and soul.
-Publishers Weekly

Dossey (executive editor, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing) has written numerous volumes on the subjects of mind-body medicine and the role of consciousness in healing. For his first book since the best-selling Healing Words, he has collected scholarly research, experience and phenomena, and historical references on remedies or interventions for common, everyday illnesses. Easily acquired by anyone and available within our natural world, these remedies include optimism, forgetting, novelty, tears, dirt, music, risk, plants, bugs, unhappiness, nothing, voices, mystery, and miracles. For each, Dossey begins the discussion in terms of its use in history or with a scenario of someone's life experience with a corresponding illness, where the remedy was used or would be useful. Many of the claims made regarding the healing sources are based in empirical research, with citations listed in the notes section at the book's end. Because the text is written in a smooth narrative fashion, the reader's interest is engaged and held. Recommended for public and consumer health libraries.
-Beth Hill, Library Journal

In this elegant, thoughtful, and profoundly useful book, Larry Dossey reminds us of the healing power of the life around us and offers us the gift of new eyes. "The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things" vindicates anyone who has looked beyond drugs and surgery in search of their own ability to heal.
- Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., author of "Kitchen Table Wisdom"

Larry Dossey's insights into the ordinary illuminate a path to happiness and help us see ' the universe in a grain of sand.'
- Mehmet C. Oz, M.D., coauthor of "YOU: The Owner's Manual"

Delightful, human, funny, poignant, and surpassingly wise, Larry Dossey's essays are a national treasure.
- Joan Borysenko, author of "A Woman's Journey to God"

One of our most original thinkers on the nature of consciousness and its role in healing.
- Michael Lerner, president of Commonweal

Larry Dossey's words of wisdom have inspired and challenged me for years.
- Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of "Mother-Daughter Wisdom"

In his quirky, brilliant, and passionate book, Larry Dossey offers us the quintessence of a lifetime's search and conveys his message with the lucid grace of a born writer and the authority of a sage. In a hundred years, he will be remembered as someone who, in a grand way, assisted a shift in how we perceive the magic and mystery of our world and our place within it.
- Andrew Harvey, author of" The Direct Path"

About Larry Dossey

This tall and distinguished Texas physician, deeply rooted in the scientific world, has become an internationally influential advocate of the role of the mind in health and the role of spirituality in healthcare. Bringing the experience of a practicing internist and the soul of a poet to the discourse, Dr. Larry Dossey offers panoramic insight into the nature and the future of medicine.

Upon graduating with honors from the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Dossey worked as a pharmacist while earning his M.D. degree from Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, 1967. Before completing his residency in internal medicine, he served as a battalion surgeon in Vietnam, where he was decorated for valor. Dr. Dossey helped establish the Dallas Diagnostic Association, the largest group of internal medicine practitioners in that city, and was Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital in 1982.

An education steeped in traditional Western medicine did not prepare Dr. Dossey for patients who were blessed with "miracle cures," remissions that clinical medicine could not explain. "Almost all physicians possess a lavish list of strange happenings unexplainable by normal science," says Dr. Dossey. "A tally of these events would demonstrate, I am convinced, that medical science not only has not had the last word, it has hardly had the first word on how the world works, especially when the mind is involved."

The author of nine books and numerous articles, Dr. Dossey is the former Executive Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, the most widely subscribed-to journal in its field. The primary quality of all of Dr. Dossey's work is scientific legitimacy, with an insistent focus on "what the data show." As a result, his colleagues in medical schools and hospitals all over the country trust him, honor his message, and continually invite him to share his insights with them. He has lectured all over the world, including major medical schools and hospitals in the United States --Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, the Universities of Pennsylvania, California, Washington, Texas, Florida, Minnesota, and the Mayo Clinic.

The impact of Dr. Dossey's work has been remarkable. Before his book Healing Words was published in 1993, only three U.S. medical schools had courses devoted to exploring the role of religious practice and prayer in health; currently, nearly 80 medical schools have instituted such courses, many of which utilize Dr. Dossey's works as textbooks. In his 1989 book Recovering the Soul, he introduced the concept of "nonlocal mind" -- mind unconfined to the brain and body, mind spread infinitely throughout space and time. Since then, "nonlocal mind" has been adopted by many leading scientists as an emerging image of consciousness. Dr. Dossey's ever-deepening explication of nonlocal mind provides a legitimate foundation for the merging of spirit and medicine. The ramifications of such a union are radical and call for no less than the reinvention of medicine.