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

This extraordinary book offers nothing less than a new vision of medical care. Rudolph Ballentine, M.D., has created a unique, integrative blending of the primary holistic schools of healing that is far more potent than any one of these alone.

Like Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil, Rudolph Ballentine is a medical doctor who became intrigued by the workings of mind-body medicine and looked beyond the West in his search for understanding. Drawing on thirty years of medical study and practice, Dr. Ballentine has accomplished a singular feat: integrating the wisdom of the great traditional healing systems--especially Ayurveda, homeopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine, European and Native American herbology, nutrition, psychotherapy, and bodywork. Melded together, the profound principles buried in these systems become clearer and stronger, and a new level of effectiveness becomes possible. Healing and reorganization are accelerated and deepened--physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The result is transformation. The result is radical healing.

Radical Healing harnesses nature's medicinals--plants and other natural substances--with commonsense essentials such as diet, exercise, and cleansing, as well as the most profound principles of spiritual and psychological transformation. In Dr. Ballentine's synthesis, illness is an opportunity for growth that can go far beyond recovery. Through radical healing old habits and attitudes that supported the development of disease fall away, to be replaced by the clarity that comes with a whole new way of being in the world.

Radical Healing: Integrating the World's Great Therapeutic Traditions to Create a New Transformative Medicine--the title sounds like an impossible undertaking. Yet Ballentine, an American physician and psychiatrist trained in many of the world's healing traditions, succeeds. He introduces the principles of holistic healing and presents an integrated system combining the awareness, tools, and practices taught by a variety of healing disciplines, including Ayurveda, homeopathy, and herbal medicine. Ballentine explains the principles of "nature's medicinals," based on the herbal traditions of China, India (Ayurvedic), Europe, and Native America. He presents several self-assessment techniques, including body maps and mind/body types. He describes the use of exercise, nutrition and cleansing (detoxification), and holistic techniques for working with energy and consciousness. Extensive resources for integrating holistic healing approaches into your daily life let you continue after the book ends. Radical Healing is not a quick fix--it's intelligent, philosophical, and detailed, best for those who are interested in learning about different schools of holistic healing approaches, open to new insights and skills, and willing to devote time to learning to use them. --Joan Price