Customer Reviews

Help Me To Heal

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4 star:		(1)
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Bernie Siegel and Yosaif August have based their book on three main principles:

1. You have the right to heal, no matter what your life experience has been.

2. You can create a healing team.

3. You can learn to become the master of your life's time.

This book is divided into three main sections:

Part I: A Patient's Survival Guide - This section explains how you can form a healing team, protect yourself in a variety of ways (including making sure the people caring for you wash their hands) and speaking up about anything you feel might be a mistake. Chapter 3 explains what you need to know to prepare for a hospital stay. I liked the list of healing objects you can take into the hospital to make you feel less stressed. This could range from a favorite quilt to favorite music, photos, healthy snacks and your laptop computer. This section addresses issues like having a private room or sharing a room, dealing with aromas and intrusions.

Part II: Healing Strategies for Family, Friends, and Caregivers - This is a section for those who are looking after someone who is healing.

Part III: Healing Ways - An interesting section on bedside yoga, breathing exercises, stretching and massage. Instructions are given for helping the healing process with the healing power of touch.

There is an extensive resource section with ideas like "bedscapes" that can be put up on a wall to help patients feel less closed into a room.

Bernie Siegel and Yosaif August have created a beautiful gift for patients and caregivers. I also hope doctors and nurses will read this book so they can observe care from the patient's perspective.

~The Rebecca Review

I finished this book right before going in for surgery and the timing couldn't have been better. The book is described as a "practical" guidebook which is right on the mark because after reading it I felt far better prepared at making sure I got the kind of care I needed and far better at expressing those needs
Simply put, it fills a gap that has long been missing in the medical world: helping patients strengthen their rightful place in directing an important part of their own recovery. Get it for anyone you love who is about to go into the hospital - especially yourself!

This book really helps the patient to be his best advocate and navigate his way through the sometimes scary medical maze. I highly recommend it to anyone dealing with illness and doctors and health care practitioners.

The coming together of Yosaif August and Bernie Siegel is truly a match made in heaven. If you or a loved one is ill, chances are you will be needing strong, wise and compassionate allies. And you'll find them through the voices of these two wonderful, often hilariously funny, always compassionate and most importantly eminently practical men. If you want to learn how to be militantly on your own side -- when doing so could save your life - read this book!

I have a couple of other books by Bernie Siegel. They are well written and helpful to both the sick patient and the caretaker. This one is particularly good. I bought 7 of them to pass around to my friends.

If you are in the process of healing, in the process of helping a loved one heal, or have made healing your life's work, you need this book.


Help Me to Heal is co-authored by Yosaif August the inventor of Bedscapes(r)which helps create healing environments for patients through the use of the soothing sounds of nature coupled with really cool cubicle curtains that are actually life-sized pictures of nature. For those of you that have been to my office, I had the "tropical" themed curtains separating my treatment tables.


I had the pleasure of spending three days this week with Yosaif at a Coach Training Institute event in Manhattan. When we met, we immediately hit it off. He told me that he was there to hone his skills as a health care coach. He said that he wanted to help people negotiate our complex health care system. He said that he wants to help them empower themselves to make better health care decisions, and ask better questions of their health care professionals. When he told me that he had actually written a book about it, I went right to my kindle and ordered it. Within seconds, it was delivered to my device and I was reading it on the Jitney home. From the preface, I was hooked. I have to admit, I am biased. Patient empowerment, a holistic approach to healing, using humor as a force for empathic healing! I am all over this stuff! As many of you know, these are the very things that I am working on as Executive Director of the Optimal Health Alliance.



The book begins by helping you establish your rights as an empowered patient.

book on three main principles:

1. You have the right to heal, no matter what your life experience has been.

2. You can create a healing team.

3. You can learn to become the master of your life's time.



As a professional, I found that the book helped me re-connect with why I do what I do. It helped me to cut through the accumulation of meaningless trash that has crept into my professional life and helped me to re-focus on what matters. . . helping people restore balance, richness and wholeness to their life.



As a former, and potentially future, "patient," the book helped me to remember that a time of illness is a time to gather your tribe. Assemble what matters most to you and use those resources (family, friends, pets, reminders, memories, affirmations and attitudes) for your healing. It reminded me of the importance of not suffering in silence. The importance of making the most of what you got and accepting those gifts as honest tools for recovery.



As a man who morns the loss of the most important man in my life, my dad- (the picture is of me and dad on "Shadow" sometime in the late 1960's)

- the book helped me to understand that healing really is about restoring wholeness. It is not about avoiding death. The book helped me to see that dad had a "good death" and that our love and support made him whole. Oh sure, I wish he were still here. I miss him every day - but my father died with dignity, honor, bravery and a love beyond all comprehension. This book validated much of that experience for me. I was so grateful to read that my part in my father's passing played a big role in him leaving me complete and whole. If you are caring for a loved one (even if it is you), I implore you to read this book.

This is an excellent resource for any person involved with someone's healing. It shows you how to best approach your healing, how to create a healing environment as well as creating a team focused on healing. The strategies and tools are excellent, the insights profound.

Whether you are a carer, a practitioner, a family or friend and especially if you are the person in need of healing... get this book, but don't just read it. Use it!

Help me to Heal was a very easy, fast, read. It is a book that I will probably read again and again.

As a hospital chaplain, I find this is just the right approach for patients and their families and friends.

This book helps to heal the body and enliven and mobilize the spirit. It is an uplifitng guide to surviving and thriving.
I especially appreciate all the ways it offers to make hospital visits truly healing - for patient and visitor and how to create a "healing team" with medical professionals and family and friends. It offers real tools to help folks find and strengthen their own inner resources . And it's fun to read!!!