IONS: Consciousness and Healing

There is no other book on the market that pulls together so many leaders in this field and presents material on healing and integral medicine from such an interdisciplinary and scientific perspective.

While there are other books available that cover healing, CAM, and integral medicine to some extent, Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine will be the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of work on the subject. The editors and contributors see this book as a call to action for health professionals and patients alike. They feel that physicians and patients carry the responsibility to help craft a new, more fitting way of practicing medicine in light of the major crisis in the practice and delivery of healthcare in the United States. The purpose of this book is to ask those health professionals and patients to take the time to consider the integral perspective, the view that the scientific quest is incomplete without data from many domains of inquiry, and that human transcendence can occur in the face of illness and disease.

Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine is a collection of 47 essays on integral medicine, consciousness, and healing that integrates mainstream medical knowledge with recent developments in the emerging areas of frontier sciences and insights from alternative healing perspectives. It promotes a model of healing in which personal relationships, emotions, meaning, and belief systems are viewed as fundamental points of connection between body, mind, spirit, society, and nature. Integral medicine embraces the recognition that human beings possess emotional, spiritual, and relational dimensions that are essential in the diagnosis and treatment of disease and the cultivation of wellness.

The alternative healing perspectives in this book include: multicultural healing systems, relational medicine, subtle energies and energy medicine, contemplative mind, meditation, distant healing through intercessory prayer and intentionality, and ecologically based healing systems. Readers learn from the leaders in the emerging field of integral medicine and consciousness research, from the most well known (Deepak Chopra), to the frontline policy makers (James Gordon—one of the heads of the White House Commission on Conventional and Complementary and Alternative Medicine). Readers also gain insights from physicians who have experienced healing within themselves and witnessed remarkable healing in their clients. They hear from other medical professionals (through the essays and the interviews on the accompanying DVD) who approach medicine from an array of cultural perspectives, as well as hear from patients who have experienced this multicultural, interdisciplinary, and participatory healing system in action.

The essays are organized into 5 major sections, with contributions in each by pioneers in the emerging field of consciousness and healing
Section 1	Begins by introducing the implications of an integral perspective for medicine. In order for the transformation to an integral approach to medicine to take place, a full system shift is needed.
Section 2	Explores the nature of the healing system through the review of recent developments in mind-body medicine. The subfields in this section are not well-known within modern medicine, but the contributors present a valid argument for their place in medicine.
Section 3	Embraces other dimensions of the healing system, including religion and spirituality. The essays in this section reveal the epidemiological data that better health is correlated with religious participation.
Section 4	Focuses on the multiple ways of knowing that are involved in an integral approach to healing. With the increasing popularity of alternative medicine in the United States, biomedicine is being forced to view health and healing within broader cultural contexts.
Section 5	Reviews the challenges facing Western medicine: economic factors, an increasing burden of chronic illness, higher levels of physician and patient dissatisfaction, and environmental and social ills.

The DVD packaged with the book contains 50 minutes of video footage that explores the revolution that is rethinking everything from the nature of healing and curing to the roles of healer and patient; that is studying the dramatic effect of consciousness on healing; that believes that we exist within vast systems that profoundly affect our personal health. There are also an additional 9 essays that are narrated on the DVD in audio format only.