A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
144 of 152 people found the following review helpful.
This book is a game changer for your health
By Ken Jaques
My thoughts are that the material in this book truly leads us to shift our thinking about how we look at our health and illness, and REMEMBER the body’s innate ability to help heal itself. It contains a wealth of information, as well as practical approaches for you to develop your own personal approach to your health and happiness. I would go so far as to suggest that this book should form part of a curriculum for students from early ages where subconscious beliefs and programming are first formed, right through to medical school. Anyone diagnosed with a health condition, anyone “worried” that they might be predisposed to a condition, or anyone simply looking to maintain their existing good health can benefit from reading this book.
103 of 112 people found the following review helpful.
Required Reading for Medical Students
By T. Gilbert
This is a first in a continuing series of self-help books I will be reviewing for Hay House Publishing. I am not being financially compensated to write these reviews and they are based solely on my over 36 years of experience in helping and healing other people as a self-help practitioner.The book I chose for my first examination and review is “Mind Over Medicine” written by Lissa Rankin, M.D. I chose this book first because I wanted to read something written by someone from the field of “established medicine” rather than someone from my own field of spiritual healing.The book is divided into three parts. Part One is entitled “Believe Yourself Well.” In this section of the book Dr. Rankin gives us voluminous amounts of studies and anecdotal evidence in regards to the importance of the mind helping the body to heal. The book is heavily footnoted if you wish to follow up on her references.I found this section of the book to be very interesting because here we have an M.D., Dr. Rankin, not only acknowledging the importance of many things such as bedside manner, love, compassion, and other “spiritual aspects” in helping people to heal but also reciting case studies proving it. In my opinion, for the average M.D. to acknowledge such things is highly unusual but I wish it were the norm rather than the exception. Thus, Dr. Rankin proved to me from the outset that she is no “average” M.D.I very much enjoyed the first part of the book as she included a lot of personal stories along with the research studies so I found it well-written and entertaining as well.Part Two of the book is called “Treat Your Mind.” In this section of the book Dr. Rankin starts out with a chapter called “Redefining Health”. I was very heartened to see her defining health in much the same way that I personally define it which is to include more than just physical health. In other words, she included things like having healthy relationships, sexual health, spiritual health, mental health, having a life purpose, and a healthy, non-toxic work environment among other things.In this section she also went over many more studies which backed up her assertions that these other areas of life and existence were just as, if not more, important in maintaining a person’s physical health. This is one of the things that I liked best about her book. Since she is a classically trained M.D. her viewpoint and experience made her “find proof” for all the phenomena she was researching and observing. Thus, this book is written not only for lay people, or people seeking alternative treatments to heal themselves, but also for medical students and established doctors as well.The last part of the book is for people who want to “write their own prescription.” In this section she seeks to help people lead a happier life, even people who may have some “incurable” disease. She has included many links and protocols to help anyone change their lives for the better and quoted more studies showing the advantage people who are happy have in possibly curing themselves.Overall I found her book entertaining, well-researched and very helpful. After finishing it, I am fully convinced that her book could very well help change the mind of an established M.D. I also believe that if her book was required reading for first year medical students that Dr. Rankin could achieve her goal to revitalize the art of medicine.
88 of 99 people found the following review helpful.
Life-Changing Book–Everything You Want To Know About Mind-Body Medicine Without The “Woo-Woo”
By O. Brown
*****This cutting-edge book is unique in its mission–the author (a conventional medical doctor who has left her mainstream practice in order to assist people in healing holistically) has wildly succeeded in her attempt to prove scientifically that in so many ways we can heal ourselves. The book is unique because its approach is not woo-woo or only anecdotally-based, but grounded in science and in studies from mainline medical journals. This is not an academic or scholarly book, however; it is accessible for any reader and will especially appeal to those who want concrete ways based on sound medical research to embark upon their own healing, even if they are staying within conventional (allopathic) medicine.The book is endorsed by Christiane Northrup, MD; life coach Martha Beck; Bernie Siegel, MD; shame researcher Brene Brown, PhD; Larry Dossey, MD; and others such as Anita Moorjani, Danielle Laporte, SARK, and Chris Guillebeau. If you like and respect these authors, you will most certainly enjoy this book immensely.The author has developed a new wellness model that she has details in the last part of the book. Her talents as a physician and a type of life coach have merged in this model. It looks to be very useful. Just from working through it in the book, the reader can develop her/his own personal health plan.The author does not disparage conventional doctors or allopathic medicine even when she points out their flaws, but advocates that all practitioners work together as part of the patients’ health care team.Some topics covered include: meditation, current research on optimism and happiness, workaholism, community, spontaneous remission, the placebo effect, the nocebo effect, limiting beliefs, and so much more. These are not the same things you’ve read everywhere else, either–if you care about this area of study and are a healer, you will want to own this book.The book can be useful to those who are struggling with illness (as the author herself did), those who are well, practicing medical professionals (ah, if only more would read this!), and those who work with mind-body interactions (which should be all healers of any type). I especially recommend it to readers like myself who are life coaches working with advanced mind-body tools who want an accessible explanation for why their modality works–who want an explanation of how–exactly–the mind creates emotions–the book is worth it for that information alone.The only way I can think of that this book could be improved upon is if it had an index…though my copy is highlighted and self-indexed with notes, and I have a feeling that yours will be the same!Highly recommended.*****
See all 299 customer reviews…