Potentiating Health and the Crisis of the Immune System

With all the enormous resources that are invested in medicine, it is sometimes a mystery why there is so much sickness still in evidence. Our life span, though higher than at any time in history, has now leveled off and has not significantly increased in the last two generations. There is a one-third increase in long-term illness in the last 20 years and a 44% increase in cancer incidence, which are not related to demographic issues. In some modern countries, the level of morbidity (defined as days off work because of sickness) has increased by two thirds in this time. Despite $1 trillion spent on cancer research in 20 years, the "War On Cancer" has recently been pronounced a complete failure by the u. s. President's Cancer Panel. Evidently we still have a long way to go. The goal of "Health for All by the Year 2000" as the World Health Organization has put it, is another forgotten dream. As ever, the answer will be found in breaking out of the old philosophical patterns and discovering the new, as yet unacceptable concepts. The problems of medicine today require a Kuhnian breakthrough into new paradigms, and new ways of thinking. And these new ways will not be mere variations of the old, but radical departures. This book, and the conference upon which it was based, is part of a search for these new pathways.

I. General Concepts.- 1. Updating Flexner: An Expanded Approach to Health and Healing.- 2. The New Science of Health.- 3. Health and Healing: Developing Our Potential.- 4. Limits of Specialization and Integrated Approaches.- 5. The Health Consequences of Competing Conventional and Alternative Definitions of Health.- 6. Towards a New Epistemoiogy for Health and Healing.- 7. The Wounded Body: Towards a Phenomenology of Health and Illness.- 8. Food as Medicine for Body and Soul.- II. Protecting Immunity.- 9. The Magic of the Immune System.- 10. Setting Up the Immune System: Perinatal Influences.- 11. Discovery of the Human Being's Superstress Adaptation Biological Organ.- 12. Sequential Hydrotherapy Improves the Immune Response of Cancer Patients.- 13. Adaptogens - Natural Protectors of the Immune System.- 14. Potentiating the Immune System according to the Traditional Chinese Medicine.- III. Mind-Body Issues.- 15. Non-Conventional Cancer Therapies: Criteria for Evaluation and Rationales for Implementation-Helping Patients Decide.- 16. Coping with Cancer and the Search for Meaning.- 17. An Investigation into the Effects of a Counselling and Guided Imagery Programme on the Outcome of People with Stable Angina and following Myocardial Infarction.- 18. Reality and Myths about Breast Cancer: A Personal Journey.- IV. Therapeutic Programs.- 19. Methionine Enkephalin: A New Cytokine with Antiviral and Antitumor Activities.- 20. VG-1000 - a Therapeutic Vaccine for Cancer.- 21. "Female Related Surgeries" - Pre- and Post-Surgical Massage as a Key to Successful Healing.- 22. Parasympathetic Stimulation through the "Vodder" Original Manual Lymphatic Drainage.- 23. Biological Resonance and the State of the Organism: Functional Electrodynamical Testing.- 24.Apitherapy (Bee Venom Therapy): Literature Review.