cover image Radical Healing: Integrating the World's Great Therapeutic Traditions to Create a New Transformat Ive Medicine

Radical Healing: Integrating the World's Great Therapeutic Traditions to Create a New Transformat Ive Medicine

Rudolph Ballentine. Harmony, $27.5 (624pp) ISBN 978-0-609-60137-2

This detailed volume introduces a vast array of techniques--drawn from the ancient traditions of India and China, among others--intended to help readers achieve better health and richer lives. Ballentine, an M.D. also trained in Indian medicine, makes a convincing case against reductive and mechanical Western notions of diagnosis, disease and cure. Instead, his program focuses on openness to new ideas, self-exploration and awareness. Recommendations include not just regular exercise and sound nutrition but also detoxification, meditation, massage, breath and energy work, as well as the use of homeopathic, herbal and flower remedies. Significantly, Ballentine concedes that few holistic techniques are currently effective against many life-threatening problems. His approach focuses on prevention and less-severe diseases, and the appendix covering alternative visions and treatments of 100 common illnesses omits AIDS, coronary disease and cancer entirely (a detailed bibliography does direct the reader to other sources, however). Ballentine provides an informative and practical guide, hampered only by his remarkably encyclopedic knowledge, which can interfere with the book's readability. This is a guidebook for the highly motivated; it is notable for its unifying, often compelling vision of an integrative and self-directed approach to well-being. (Jan.)