Review: A very quick survey of alternative health practices
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 6, 2014
As someone who has lived many of the concepts discussed in these books for years I looked forward to reading this work. I wanted to see what he had to say, to see if there was something new which I might use. For me, he didn't cover anything new, but this isn't a complaint against the book, as I'm not his target audience.Let me get the negatives out of the way first, then I'll tell you what I liked. My two complaints about the book are he should have spent more time editing the book and expressing his ideas. In some instances I had to reread passages to understand what he was saying. That said, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has had little exposure to alternative medicine but wants to know more.The book is rather short, but in this case, short is good. This is not an exhaustive treatise, but a high level introduction to each of these topics. They cover the entire spectrum of alternative medicine with an emphasis diet. For example, if you want learn in depth how diet affects your health, the China Study is where you should go. If you just want an introduction plus a "bullet list" of things you can do to get started, this book will be perfect.It's broken into seven books. A quick note: the order the books listed here is how they are presented in the book, not how they are listed in the Amazon description.1. Natural Healing - This is an introduction to "natural healing." It's main point, which I totally agree with is, the body heals itself, the best medicine can do is assist.2. Causes Diseases - This is an introduction to the natural healing tenet that all diseases in the body originate from toxin in the body. Infections, such as colds, flu etc. arise from toxicity rather than the organisms. He argues the key to good health is the efficient elimination of toxins from the body.3. Weight Fasting - This is an introduction to fasting as a cure for chronic or degenerate conditions in the body. At the end of the book it goes into fasting as a form of weight loss. The fasting introduced in this book is not your typical Catholic Lent or Mormon type of fast, it's a medical fast. Weight lost fasting described here is much more than simply reducing your caloric intake, it's a juice or water diet that lasts weeks.4. Cleansing Colon - This book introduces two therapeutic cleansing procedures, enemas and colonics. The more "intense" therapy is the colonic. Neither is as "intense" as the prolonged fasts described in book three.5. Health Diet Nutrition - This is the book you should read and use most if you adopt the "natural" approach to maintaining good health. It focuses on proper diet and approaches to meal planning which make it easier for your body to extract the nutrients you need from the foods you eat. If I were going to suggest a different order in the presentation of the material, this would be the second book. If you read only one section of the series, this is it! I found the chapter defining the best diet for a long life to be particularly interesting.6. Vitamins Nutrition - Right behind Health Diet Nutrition, this is the second most important book in the series. It goes less into meal schedules and planning and more on what foods are best to eat.7. Body Recovery - This is more a wrap up of the preceding books and focuses on putting them all in their proper place within the natural healing discipline. It takes information from the previous books and shows how they can be used for such things as cancer recovery. In some aspects this is more for the individual who is dealing with a major health problem and wants to know the best strategy for getting well.You'll find a lot of helpful information to get started on your study of natural health practices and therapies. Books five and six are preventative in nature, the rest are focused on therapies for dealing with existing problems. It stumbles on editing, but it's a gold mine of information for those who want or need a quick introduction into natural healing.