Paradox Publishing
Paradox & Healing
Medicine Mythology and Transformation
- By Michael Greenwood and Peter Nunn
- Cover / Illustrations by Miles Lowry
- 5th edition
- New Age / Mythology
$25.00 CND
Summary
Paradox & Healing provides fascinating and sometimes startling new insights into the problem of illness. Beautifully illustrated by Miles Lowry, the book weaves science and mythology together in a way that enhances medical thinking. Using myths and folktales in their traditional roles as teaching tools, Paradox & Healing is a lucid and heartfelt advocacy by two physicians of the power of transformation and holistic thinking for healing our minds, bodies and spirits.Endorsements
Paradox & Healing takes us beyond our usual concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, joy and suffering, pain and pleasure, love and hate and shows us that the true healing must involve a joyful reconciliation with, and a lively coexistence of the poles of opposites that make life a meaningful experience.
Deepak Chopra, M.D., Author of Quantum Healing and Ageless Body, Timeless Mind
Science in this century has shown that common sense is not a reliable guide to understanding how things work. In Paradox & Healing, Drs. Greenwood and Nunn show why this same caution applies to staying well and overcoming illness. Unless we make a place for the paradoxical, we will never understand health and illness. That's why this book is an important contribution.
Larry Dossey, M.D., Author of Meaning and Medicine and Space, Time, and Medicine.
Reviews
Dr. Leslie Arden Foote
For anyone in the healing arts who ponders and struggles with patients and their chronic diseases, this is a must read. Both authors re-evaluate the dilemma of chronic illness and pain from a holistic standpoint.
Diane Davis
This book came about as a result of the author’s experience working with chronic pain sufferers, using acupuncture and bodywork techniques. It helps the reader understand the processes of body-brain behaviour relationships, and the multiple factors influencing the perception of pain, by using paradoxes posed in mythological stories as analogies for pain behaviours. For example, the first chapter deals with the intellect-dominant solutions and uses story of “The King and His Three Sons”, a Russian fairy tale which, when analyzed, demonstrates the choices we face in life.
Dr. Thérèse Madden-Fitzsimons
In 22 chapters, the authors look at the problems of chronic illness and pain: "chronic" because, by definition, the illness and pain do not respond to usual treatments. In their introduction, the authors suggest that chronically ill patients face the problem of paradox: the existence of something such as an untreatable illness that conflicts with out preconceived notions of what is reasonable or possible. The simplest way to avoid paradox is to deny its existence by denying one-half of its self-contradictory proposition. Thus, denial drives us to avoid the reality that no matter how unpleasant it may be, illness is a real part of us and ultimately must be confronted. In their introduction, and at greater length throughout the book, the authors note that this kind of collective denial is at the root of our medicine and of modern Western society. It is this denial that allows us the conviction that reason is somehow superior to emotion, because feelings are irrational – they do not obey the dictates of logic. This in turn permits the rational to create the world in its own image and thus to dismiss the role of the "irrational" in either the disease process or its treatment. The authors declare that, as practicing doctors, they have come to believe that the denial of our feelings – that "irrational" part of ourselves – will eventually lead to chronic pain and illness.
Robert Aitken
In the interest of our shifting from a paradigm of unsatisfying compromise (victim/martyr/sacrifice) to one of uncompromising satisfaction (which is what the prevailing "regenerate, or else!" energies are all about, there are certain paradoxical notions that best be confronted and dealt with. Only then, are we able to comprehend the true nature of the healing experience and take responsibility for our own healing. Dr.'s Michael Greenwood and Peter Nunn are conventionally trained Canadian physicians, authors of Paradox and Healing: Medicine, Mythology and Transformation. They point out that we only get "better" when we stop trying to "get better".