On Healing: Finding Wholeness Beyond the Limits of Medicine

by Amitha Kalaichandran

Overview

In On Healing, Dr. Amitha Kalaichandran MD -- a physician, journalist, and integrative medicine expert, guides readers on a transformative journey to understand true healing and what it means to live longer, healthier lives. Drawing from her medical training and real-world experiences, she identifies 12 essential components of healing, each explored through powerful stories and backed by scientific evidence. Blending expert insights and cross-cultural perspectives, On Healing challenges the limitations of modern healthcare, advocating for a holistic approach that honors the body's natural ability to heal. Dr. Kalaichandran's debut is a compelling blueprint for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of healing, making it an essential read for navigating today's evolving health, longevity, and wellness landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781956474534
Publisher:	Heliotrope Books LLC
Publication date:	01/14/2025
Pages:	374
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.83(d)

Editorial Reviews

★ 2025-01-01
A doctor explores a world of treatments beyond pharmaceuticals and surgery in this searching investigation of wellness.

Kalaichandran, a pediatrician and journalist, starts by revisiting her travails working at an Ontario hospital where, she says, the hostility of senior staff caused her to develop anxiety, depression, and high cholesterol levels. The ordeal prompted her to research connections between mental and physical healing and embark on a tour of alternate therapies. The journey took her to a yoga training retreat in Mexico; a mass hypnosis session, which opened insights into the placebo effect (fake surgeries can be as effective as real ones in alleviating orthopedic pain and disability, she reports); new foods (she adopted the Mediterranean and Portfolio Diets and light fasting); and a trip on MDMA—ecstasy—to see whether psychedelics really do alleviate intractable mental problems. (As advertised, the experience showed her “a side to our existence that felt sublime and…connected to the larger universe,” she writes.) Kalaichandran also probes darker aspects of the medical profession that contribute to the unhappiness of doctors. These include residents’ sleep deprivation from 24-hour shifts (the practice was popularized by a cocaine-addicted surgeon, she notes), toxic hospital office politics, and bullying campaigns conducted by powerful doctors against underlings because of personal grudges, racism, and sexism—a dynamic that she credits with causing her own mental health issues. Kalaichandran presents a lucid, nuanced account of the science behind the unconventional ideas she explored amid an intricate analysis of social and psychological determinants of disease, drawing on observations of her own patients. Beyond the lucid exposition of studies and theories, there’s an evocative, spiritual richness in her prose, as when, for example, she analyzes the importance of accepting the inevitable through a plangent recollection of a patient dying of cancer: “And so, Priya had passed away, as a slow withering out of this world, while her mother fought her own resistance around letting go among the machines and cords and fluorescent lights of a small ICU room.” The result is a fascinating, hopeful meditation on sickness and recovery.

An engrossing, inspirational call for a medicine that takes the soul as seriously as the body.

Kirkus Reviews