Customer Reviews

Invitation to Holistic Health: A Guide to Living a Balanced Life, Second Edition

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I bought this book as a requirement for a class, but I have found it to be very useful outside of a "school environment". Lots of information and resources. Worth buying if you are one who wishes to create a more holistic approach to your lifestyle.

A lot of the material is common sense but it's nicely organized and fairly well written. Provides a concise and easy to understand introduction to Eastern wellness such as yin & yang philosophy.

I have been working my way through this book for a holistic well being class, and I like the book more and more as I read it. The book covers all the topics I would want discussed and offers additional resources at the end of each chapter.

This book was required reading for a class I was taking. The author makes grandiose claims without providing a shred of evidence to support those claims. She suggests using aromatherapy to treat high blood pressure - but offers no explanation as to why this would work, and cites no studies that prove it does work! This book is just the author's unopposed platform to state whatever she pleases. Like most "complementary, alternative medicine", the suggestions in this book are neither complementary or medicine, just garbage.

So, this book does offer many synonyms for that central figment of holistic [whatever that means] medicine / CAM, that physiology is controlled by a "life force."

You get: "every society had a term for the life force [...e.g.] pneuma [...] chi (qi) [...] life force [...] prana [...] ki [...] mana [...] bioenergy, biomagnetism, subtle energy [p.227...] chi (qi), or life force [p.228]."

I particularly like the claim:

"the basic premise underlying the science [!!!] of homeopathy is that the body's own healing process is activated to cure illness naturally [...] the remedies stimulate and increase the vital force (often referred to as the life force) [...] the vital force is the energy responsible for the health status of the body [...] homeopathy is based on the theory that illness emerges as a result of a disturbance of the body's vital force, causing an imbalance in the energy within a person [p.412]."

Well, vitalism is hugely outside of science.

So, I fully appreciate the absurdity: science = science-ejected.

-r.c.