Amazon.com Review
Western and Eastern medical professionals, alternative practitioners, and science researchers all agree: exercise is therapeutic. Physical activity can assist healing, and specific types of exercise can improve health and combat illness. Carol and Mitchel Krucoff have dissected the research and created a series of practical, motivating plans to incorporate "healing moves" into your lifestyle, whatever your health conditions.
"Physical activity can help some diabetics come off insulin and some hypertensives quit their high-blood-pressure medication," write the authors (Carol Krucoff is a science writer and health columnist for the Washington Post; husband Mitchel Krucoff is a senior staff cardiologist and director of the Ischemia Monitoring Laboratory at Duke University Medical Center). "It can lower cholesterol, ease arthritic pain, lift depression, relieve anxiety, and help asthmatics breathe more easily." Moreover, exercise helps slow the aging process, improves heart and lung function, increases metabolism, and strengthens the immune system.
Healing Moves is an indispensable, readable, science-based resource for people who wish to improve their health with exercise. Special chapters target metabolic disorders (such as diabetes and obesity); mental health conditions (stress, depression, anxiety); orthopedic disorders (back pain, repetitive stress disorder, osteoporosis); immunological conditions (colds, cancer, HIV); cardiovascular disorders; men's health; women's health; and respiratory disorders. For each, the authors explain the condition and how it is affected by lifestyle, its risk factors, and how exercise helps. Then they give an exercise prescription with general and specific guidelines, cautions, and additional resources. Each chapter offers specific "healing moves" that include specific aerobic, strength, relaxation, mind-body, breathing, stretching, and daily-life recommendations. The illustrations are line drawings of refreshingly real looking people, complete with paunch, neck wrinkles, and eyeglasses.
The Krucoffs back up their recommendations with plenty of science, but the writing is still reader friendly, warm, and simple to understand. They offer commonsense advice, too, such as asking you, "What's the point?" of exercising when you have a cold: "If you're exercising for your health, because it makes you feel good, and to boost your immunity, why work out when your body is telling you to rest?" Healing Moves is a must-have book that promotes seeing exercise as "recess": a "play break" rather than a "workout," keeping it fun and flexible. --Joan Price
From Publishers Weekly
The premise of this call for a more physically fit America by a husband-and-wife team (Carol is a science writer and health columnist; Mitchell is a cardiologist) is that exercise is medicine, capable of alleviating ailments ranging from diabetes and osteoporosis to depression and PMS. The Krucoffs connect the rising number of people suffering from cancer, heart disease and various stress-related disorders with the decline of physical activity over the past century. While membership at a health club is now considered a sign of affluence, the Krucoffs report that less than 25 percent of all adults (and an alarmingly low percentage of children) exercise regularly, and only 30 percent of physicians prescribe physical activity for preventative and therapeutic purposes. The result of the authors' research is a volume packed with exercises to get people moving; their aim is to debunk the myth that exercise is hard work and time-consuming. For each ailment, the authors explain how physical activity can alleviate or cure symptoms and prescribe a three-part program that includes specific exercisesAsuch as swimming for arthritis, walking for high blood pressure and yoga for asthma. There are also suggestions on how to incorporate stretching, aerobic activity and strengthening into a program geared toward keeping anyone of any age healthy. Best suited to those whose lives center around desk jobs, car-to-door transport and sedentary pastimes, this book will provide a relatively simple and pleasurable introduction to healing through movement. 150 line drawings. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
