Customer Reviews

Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being

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The world around us has an influence on the quality of our mental and physical health. Being calm, happy, and finding joy in what we do will increase the quality of our health. This book provides a wonderful insight into the influence of what we see and hear on our health. Dr. Sternberg writes in a manner that is not only easy to read and understand but is highly motivating. Adults should share her insight and with children to increase the likelihood that they will grow up being aware of their environment on their health. This book provides important insights and is an important contribution not only for the quality of health of current generations, but for future generations. I recommend it highly for all who are concerned about promoting healthy lifestyles.

Dr. Sternberg's new book is a delight to read. It's one thing to demand of a competent science writer that she decipher and distill complex research and tell lay readers what the findings mean. It's quite another to demand that the writer entertains and inspires her readers at the same time. But Dr. Sternberg does both. I hope its accessibility gains the book wide readership, not only among casually interested readers, but among architects, engineers, builders and building owners. The concepts it puts forth are important--at least as important, in my opinion, as those advocated by followers of the "green building" movement, which seems all the rage right now.

Dr. Sternberg makes an excellent case for the powerful role of the mind in promoting healing. I gifted this book to a dear friend who has Multiple Sclerosis and who struggles on a daily basis to cope with her disease. There is no doubt that a positive attitude is foremost in coping with any chronic health problem. Equally important is creating an environment where that positive force can thrive. Enabling ourselves to return to a functioning level depends on our ability to comprehend the advances in research on mind-body-environment integration. To that extent the author has successfully taken complicated research discoveries and simplified them through example and discourse in layman's terms. When we acquire this knowledge and use it in our daily lives, we enhance our ability to rise above being victimized and defined by a disease process. I highly recommend this for people who are living with any chronic disease process and for their caretakers as well. The average healthy individual will find this book useful in building an environment that promotes health in their daily lives. There's no magic or superstition in this book. It's based on solid science. Read it and get on with living a good life.

After listening to a fascinating CBC radio interview with Dr. Sternberg, I bought the book for additional information and was not disappointed. It is interesting to read about new studies that provide empirical evidence supporting both old and new theories.
A great glimpse into evidence based design in healthcare facilities.

When my husband Richard and I worked with an architect to design the passive solar house where we now live, we were less concerned about the architectural style and more concerned that the house be healthy, which we defined in part as "connected to the out-of-doors" and "comfortable without fuss or excessive energy use." Hence its open, airy spaces lit by abundant natural light, the large south-facing windows framing views of the peaks rising over town, and the sliding-glass doors throughout that invite movement between the house and yard.

After reading Dr. Esther Sternberg's Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being, I understand more about the intuitive design decisions we made. Without consciously realizing it, Richard and I designed a space that is healing in the most fundamental sense, a house that makes us feel good just to live there.

"There is a turning point in the course of healing when you go from the dark side to the light, when your interest in the world revives and when despair gives way to hope," writes Sternberg in the opening paragraphs of Healing Spaces. "As you lie in bed, you suddenly notice the dappled sunlight and no longer turn your head and shield your eyes. You become aware of birdsong outside the window and the soothing whir of the ventilation system down the hall... This is when the destructive forces of illness give way to healing." That impulse toward healing, she notes, comes from within. "But do our surroundings, in turn, have an effect on us? Can the spaces around us help us heal?"

This beautifully written, intensely informative book answers those questions, and along the way, gives animated descriptions of our immune system mobilizing to heal a wound, our eyes taking in information about what we see and transmitting those images to our brains. Sternberg describes how we hear, smell, taste and feel, and then how these senses work with the brain in healing--the actual physiological "belief response"--and with the biology of the hormones that promote healing. She also portrays the personalities behind the science of health and healing (many of whom, by the way, are women) and the history of their discoveries.

Sternberg tells a good story, so even though Healing Spaces is not a light read, it is compelling. Here she pictures how our immune system repairs an incision:

When cells die, they release their contents, including chemicals that call living cells to the site. The cells they summon--white blood cells shaped like irregular spheres, called monocytes--have been happily floating through the bloodstream. Now they begin to assume a different shape, and no longer float smoothly through the blood but collide with the inner surface of the vessels. As they bump and roll along, they produce proteins on their surface that make them stick to the blood vessel walls. And then, like some primordial fish taking its first tentative steps onto land, they change shape even more. Bits of their surface reach out, like feet, and they begin to crawl and ooze, first along the blood vessel, and then through cracks between the cells that make the vessel lining. They use their foot-like extensions, called pseudopods, to crawl through the tissues beneath the blood vessel, toward the wound, drawn inexorably by the scent of the chemicals released by the dying cells.

Who knew that cells could be so, well, lively? Sternberg has an extraordinary ability to make science come alive and to describe how our bodies and brains work at the basic level. And her conclusions about how spaces as large as whole cities or as small as individual rooms--or our own brains--affect all aspects of health and healing, whether obesity or cancer, are illuminating.

As I said, Healing Spaces is not a quick read. This is a book to savor: read a bit, let it digest, and then read more. You'll reach the end understanding yourself more fully, inside and out, and with a richer sense of the ways you and your environment interact and how these interactions affect your life and health.

by Susan J. Tweit
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

I am a corporate wellness director who is often asked by superiors to justify health programming for my constituents with the evidence-base (appropriately so). Dr. Sternberg's book is a fantastic review of the impact of environment on health and why everyone should pay more attention to our surroundings as they influence many aspects of overall well-being.

I found this a fascinating book. The scientific explanations were really user-friendly and simple to understand.The best explanation I have heard. I would have liked more information provided on the research results and a little less on the descriptive information,.

I had the chance to read the first book of this writer that focus more on scientific history and clinical field. This new book is somehow a great continuation of this impressive new field but now the author focus more on practical points rather than on scientific experiments. The amount of information contained in both books are pretty good, always trying to explain scientific world in simple ways
I have learned a lot, especially about how important is to not ignore our emotions and how the environment we live in can chance our life quality. The greatest argument of this book in my opinion is scientific data that support the new view of how cities and hospital should be made. Art, gardens, light and friends all are pivotal to improve our lives and patients care

Thanks for this wonderful book and keep the good work