Sublime

in the remarkable healing powers of time, natural resilience, exercise, family and social support, and psychotherapy—and much less automatic faith in chemical imbalance and pills.

“I later discovered that my friend Lorin Smith [a Pomo Indian medicine man] in California, upon hearing of my heart trouble, had assembled a group of his students for a healing ceremony the day before the second angiogram.

In one study, researchers found that listening to music created the same pain-easing results of taking a tablet of extra-strength Tylenol.

Our natural analgesics serve an evolutionary purpose: They allow us to run fast or lift heavy objects even if we’re injured. But what about acute stress that isn’t life-threatening? It turns out that exercise elicits the same stress response, triggering the release of endogenous opioids that act in numerous areas of the brain, spinal cord, and peri

In Europe from Graeco-Roman antiquity onwards, and also among the great Asian civilizations, the medical profession systematically replaced transcendental explanations by positing a natural basis for disease and healing. Among educated lay people and physicians alike, the body became viewed as integral to law-governed cosmic elements and regular pr

Bruce Lipton’s The Biology of Belief and evolution biologist Elizabet Sahtouris’s Earth Dance: Living Systems in Evolution, scientifically validate the body as other than flesh and bone.

Early anthropologists could have called the healing practices of so-called primitive peoples “health care,” but they took pains to distinguish the native activities from the purposeful interventions of Euro-American physicians. The latter were thought to be rational and scientific, while the former were “mere” rituals, and the taint of imperialist