Mehmet C. Oz M.D. - Healing From the Heart: A Leading Surgeon Combines Eastern and Western Traditions to Create the Medicine of the Future

M ehmet Oz is a physician for the new millennium: one who integrates the best of Western allopathic medicinedrugs and surgerywith an explorers willingness to examine alternative approaches to health and healing that is both open-minded yet discriminating.

Dr. Oz is a first-rate cardiovascular surgeon, the epitome of high-tech Western medical intervention. He helped develop methods for implanting in people the left ventricular assist device, a complex, partial artificial heart to help keep patients alive while waiting for a heart transplant. He is technically proficient, but he is more than just a technician.

The heart is a pump and needs to be addressed on a physical level. However, our hearts are more than just pumps, and a true physician is more than just a plumber or a mechanic. We also have an emotional heart, a psychological heart, a spiritual heart.

Our language reflects that understanding. We yearn for our sweethearts, not our sweetpumps. Poets and musicians and artists and writers and mystics throughout the ages have described those who have an open heart or a closed heart; a warm heart or a cold heart; a compassionate heart or an uncaring heart. Love heals. I think these are more than just figures of speech.

Healing may occur even when curing is not possible. Curing when the physical disease gets better. Healing is a process of becoming whole.

When the emotional and spiritual heart begins to open, the physical heart often follows. For the past twenty years my colleagues and I have conducted a series of scientific studies demonstrating that the progression of even severe coronary heart disease often can begin to reverse by making comprehensive changes in diet and lifestyle. Since this had never before been shown, these approaches were considered by most physicians to be unconventional, alternative, even radical when I began doing this research. Now these ideas have become much more mainstream because we have been able to document the scientific validity and efficacy of these approaches.

Like Dr. Oz, I believe in the value of science in helping to sort out what works from what doesnt work, for whom, and under what circumstances. The fact that there is much in the alternative medicine world that is unproven does not mean that it is not worth examining. The true scientistlike Dr. Ozretains the dual qualities of both open-mindedness and skepticism. As he asserts, only with hard, convincing data can a fundamental change in how we practice medicine come about.

In Healing from the Heart , Dr. Oz shares with us his voyage of discovery and what he has learned from his patients: how to harness the mind and body as an ally in healing the heart on all levels. His patients showed him their different worlds, revealing something deeper than their physical symptoms, scars, and lesions.

In their own language and stories, Dr. Oz describes how his patients began opening their hearts to him, allowing him to gain a greater understanding of how their emotions, attitude, and spirit affected both the physical aspects of heart disease and their experience of it. In turn, he began opening his heart to them and through his bookto us. As both Dr. Oz and his patients helped each other to become more whole, they became healers for each other.