Leo Galland - Power Healing: Use the New Integrated Medicine to Cure Yourself

A LSO BY L EO G ALLAND , M.D.

Superimmunity for Kids

The name of every patient in this book has been changed.
Certain identifying characteristics of some
patients have been changed as well.

Copyright 1997 by Renaissance Workshops, Ltd.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random
House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

This work was originally published in hardcover as
The Four Pillars of Healing by Random House, Inc., in 1997.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Galland, Leo.
Power healing: use the new integrated medicine to cure yourself / Leo Galland.
p. m.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77938-0
1. Holistic medicine. 2. MedicinePhilosophy. I. Title.
R733.G35 1997 610dc21 96-49729

Random House website address: www.randomhouse.com

v3.1

For Christopher

You have just taken an important step toward improving your health and protecting the health of your family.

The truth is that diseases dont just happen. They result from complex, interacting factors. These are often predictable. They are also distinct for each individual.

Doctors dont cure diseases. At best we use our technical skills, our knowledge of science, and our passion for helping others to enable people to heal themselves. At worst, we undermine the healing process by ignoring the needs of the person who is sick or the bodys requirements for healing itself. The best treatmentsmedical and surgicaldepend for their ultimate effects on the healing power of the body.

These insights have begun to change the way we think about health and illness. We have learned that suppressing disease is not enough to restore health. People everywhere, doctors included, are hungry for information that allows them to strengthen the healing process.

During thirty years as a practicing physician, I have attempted to understand why some people who are ill regain their health entirely, while other people with the same disease receiving the same treatment fail to recover, and still others get better only to become sick over and over again. My research led me to the conclusion that long-term health outcomes are primarily controlled by important factors in the lives of each person. I call these factors the pillars of healing. Supporting them often has a more profound effect upon health than merely treating disease.

Since publishing the first edition of this book, I have encountered a growing acceptance of the importance of these pillars for restoring and maintaining health. Medical centers across the nation are feeling pressure from the communities they serve to be more patient-centered. Many are attempting to incorporate therapies that help to heal the person, not just treat the disease. Health maintenance organizations are exploring the concept of integrated management for patients with chronic disorders like diabetes, asthma, and arthritis. The most enlightened are beginning to realize that merely treating people with suppressive drugs is not cost-effective; they need to help people change their diets, their environments, their exercise patterns, and their attitudes. Experts on the problems of aging have concluded that the health of elderly Americans will benefit more from measures that improve physical strength, immune function, mood, and social interaction than by the medical treatment of those diseases that ravage the elderly. Alarmed at the rising global childhood mortality rate, the World Health Organization has concluded that treating each life-threatening disease as a separate entity does not work. Nutritional therapies to improve immunity and environmental hygiene to limit exposure to infections and toxins can accomplish more.

We are on the brink of a revolution in health care that is being driven not by technology but by the recognition that healing people is more effective than treating diseases.

I wish to thank Harold Evans for understanding my message and encouraging me to pursue its publication. I am grateful to Betsy Rapoport, whose guidance and brilliant editing helped to shape the structure of this book. For their enthusiasm and generous help in spreading awareness of my work, I thank Ned Alexander, Bill Beatson, Joyce and Ed Papazian, Nola Beldegreen, Lisa Gleicher, Connie Brothers, Marcia Kelly, Marlo Thomas, Elaine May, Ella Strubel, Diana Roesch, Erika and Hank Holzer, Billy Crook, Stephen Levine, Nancy Epstein, and Peter Sturtevant. Thanks also to the energetic people at Random House for their hard work and commitment, especially Carol Schneider, Pamela Cannon, Alexa Cassanos, Clara Sturak, John Rambow, and Dennis Ambrose. I would like to thank the patients who graciously allowed me to share their stories.

My wife, Christina, and our children, Jonathan, Jefferson, Jordan, and Christopher, gave their love and support throughout the long journey that led to the writing of this book. Christina and Jonathan read and edited the manuscript at every stage of its evolution, contributing insight and wisdom.

With its cold, marble floors, gray walls, and cavernous ceiling, the room reminded me of a ward in the old Bellevue Hospital, where Id spent my medical internship. The patients here, blighted and broken, lay silently in rows, tended with a reverence I had never seen in any hospital. Most were very old, four hundred to seven hundred years old, medieval altarpieces and Renaissance paintings sent from museums and churches to this hospital for sick works of art, Laboratori di Restauro, on the grounds of a fortress near the center of Florence. Botticellis Coronation of the Virgin, ready for discharge after ten years of painstaking restoration, stood leaning against a wall. Forty years it had spent on its back in the damp and musty basement of the Uffizi Gallery, its vibrant colors hidden by a brown scum of dust and mold, smelling like aged cheese and peeling so badly from a prior restoration that the picture would have fallen in flakes had it remained upright. Nearby, a Raphael Madonna awaited her return to the Palazzo Pitti. In a far room stood a ceiling-high crucifix, painted by Giotto in 1296, recently admitted from the Church of Santa Maria Novella. I had looked for it in the churchs sacristy the week before and found only its photograph and the familiar sign, IN RESTAURO (In Restoration), which confounds art lovers throughout Italy. Today I was able to climb the scaffolding and inspect Giottos masterpiece face to face. To stand in the mysterious place where restauro actually happens filled me with such excitement that I found it hard to concentrate on the purpose of my visit.

The enemies of paintings are also the enemies of people: physical injury, bacteria, fungi, and air pollution, which hastens the ravages of time and of light. Successful art restoration requires detailed scientific support, the reason why Restauro seems more like a hospital than a studio. Before 1500, most paintings were made with a mixture of egg yolk, vinegar, and plant and mineral pigments applied over several layers of aged gypsum and parchment-glue to pieces of wood stuck together with cheese and limestone. Left undisturbed and protected from light, these are the most permanent paintings that humankind has yet invented. Their colors dont darken with age, as do those of oil paintings, but shine out brightly when the grime of centuries is removed. They were rarely left undisturbed, however. Varnishing, overpainting, cosmetic trimming, and botched restoration have joined forces with microbial parasites to damage them all. Even