On Learning to Heal: or, What Medicine Doesn't Know
At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.
1141023852
On Learning to Heal: or, What Medicine Doesn't Know
At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.
25.95 In Stock
On Learning to Heal: or, What Medicine Doesn't Know

On Learning to Heal: or, What Medicine Doesn't Know

by Ed Cohen
On Learning to Heal: or, What Medicine Doesn't Know
Add to Wishlist
On Learning to Heal: or, What Medicine Doesn't Know

On Learning to Heal: or, What Medicine Doesn't Know

by Ed Cohen

Overview

At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781478023944
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 11/18/2022
Series: Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 240
File size: 408 KB

About the Author

Ed Cohen is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University and author of A Body Worth Defending, also published by Duke University Press. He hosts a therapeutic practice for people interested in healing: healingcounsel.com.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Invoking Healing  xi
Acknowledgments  xv
A Note on Shit  xvii
Overture. Healing as Desire and Value  1
1. Healing Tendencies  17
2. We Are More Complicated Than We Know  49
3. We Are More Imaginative Than We Think  81
4. When We Learn to Heal, It Matters  121
Coda: Healing with COVID, or Why Medicine is Not Enough  161
Notes  163
Bibliography  195
Index  211

What People are Saying About This

Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing - Victoria Sweet

“On Learning to Heal is the memoir-cum-medical philosophy of an intellectual with a humiliating chronic illness and his ultimately successful attempt to find a way of being both inside and outside his disease. It follows his struggles first to manage his illness and then to live with it, until finally he turns his attention to the so much that was working in his body—breathing, moving, being. What Cohen wants us to know is that if we are alive, then there is health within us. If his ideas were followed, you would be tuned instead to what is working in your body and not to what is not working, and you might find very little wrong with you and much that is right with you.”

Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move - Vincanne Adams

“With touching and incisive autobiographical accounts, Ed Cohen leads readers on a journey through his own entangling of bodily experience in relation to the limitations of modern medical thought. Part captivating story about his experience with and recovering from a devastating illness and part history and critique of the biomedical models that failed to fully comprehend his disease, On Learning to Heal is a compelling and beautiful book.”

From the B&N Reads Blog
Page 1 of

Related Subjects

Diet, Health & Fitness
Health - Diseases & Disorders
Diseases & Disorders - General & Miscellaneous
Diet, Health & Fitness
Health - Diseases & Disorders
Diseases & Disorders - General & Miscellaneous

Customer Reviews