The Healing Paradox: A Revolutionary Approach to Treating and Curing Physical and Mental Illness

by Steven Goldsmith M.D.

Overview

Why does Western medicine fail to cure chronic physical and mental illness? Why do so many treatments and drugs work only for a limited time before eventually losing effectiveness or producing harmful side effects?

Dr. Steven Goldsmith's answer is at once counterintuitive and commonsensical: the root of the problem is our combative approach. Instead of resisting and fighting our ailments, we should cooperate with and even embrace them. We should look for and apply treatments that are integrated with the causes of illness, not regard illness as an enemy to conquer.

This "hair of the dog" principle is already widely evident in practice. Take, for example, vaccines and inoculations, which are small doses of the microbes that cause the diseases being prevented; the use of the stimulant Ritalin to calm and ground people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; and radiation, which is both a well-known cause of cancer and a well-known method of treating it. These are just a few of Goldsmith's many examples, which he relays in clear, evocative, and thought-provoking language. Perhaps most compelling of all, he explores reasons why this clearly effective principle is ignored by Western medicine.

Drawing on fascinating case studies and personal experiences from his forty-year career as a medical doctor and psychiatrist—as well as abundant clinical, experimental, and public health data that support his seemingly paradoxical assertion—Dr. Goldsmith presents an exciting, revolutionary approach that will change the way you think about medicine and psychotherapy.¶

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781583946169
Publisher:	North Atlantic Books
Publication date:	06/18/2013
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

STEVEN GOLDSMITH received his MD at the Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons. In the last forty years he has practiced medicine, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and homeopathy and has held faculty and staff positions at the Boston University, Tufts University, and New York University Schools of Medicine. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he maintains a practice that emphasizes natural solutions for mental and physical illness.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Part 1 The Healing Paradox

1 Questioning Reality 3

2 The Hair of the Dog 13

3 Good/Bad 25

4 Resistance and the Side Effect 33

5 Putting Resistance on the Couch 47

6 Modern Medicine: A Health Report 59

7 Psychotherapeutic Paradox 77

8 Loops 97

9 Dialectics 107

10 Paradox within the Home 119

11 The Staying-with-it Principle 135

12 Immunization and Immunotherapy 153

13 A Little Poison Is Good for You 161

14 The Strange Obsession of Dr. Hahnemann 177

Part 2 Why We Are Still Sick

15 From Gods to Genes 199

16 RPM 219

17 Such Stuff as Dreams 231

18 The Attack of the Evil Things 245

19 Becoming Well 265

Notes 283

Permissions 301

Editorial Reviews

Accepted truths about modern medicine are upended in Goldsmith’s provocative work. … Disease is not a thing, he says, so it should not be treated as such; instead, it’s a pattern of dysfunction. What we thought was bad for us is often good, and psychology is the best paradigm for studying how organisms respond to treatment. … [The Healing Paradox is] a psychiatrist’s well-presented point of view on the shortcomings of modern medicine.”
—Kirkus

"A fascinating work illustrated throughout with case study examples and public health data, as well as Dr. Goldsmith's own professional experience and expertise as a medical doctor and psychiatrist, The Healing Paradox is exceptionally informative and very well written, making it appropriate for non-specialist general readers with an interest in alternative medicine and mental health issues. With its impressive level of medical scholarship and comprehensive approach, The Healing Paradox is also very highly recommended for community and academic library collections as well."
—Midwest Book Review

"Dr. Goldsmith is a medical insider with a truly revolutionary message: the very principles and assumptions that underlie conventional medicine are contributing  to its failures. His solution is equally revolutionary.… An engrossing and timely book."
—Amy L. Lansky, PhD, author of Impossible Cure and Active Consciousness

"… stunning in both its scope and its relevance to anyone who wants to go beyond superficial symptom management … a work of timeless value for all who are eager to understand real health."
—Scott Shannon, MD, author of Mental Health for the Whole Child and former president of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine

"An indispensible and in-depth examination of perhaps the least known, yet most fundamental, principle of human healing.... Essential reading."
—Larry Malerba, DO, author of Green Medicine

"... eloquent, original, fascinating."
—Hyla Cass, MD, author of 8 Weeks to Vibrant Health

"... a thought-provoking book, one that urges readers to rethink, on a fundamental level, the merits of allopathic medicine.... An engaging read."
—Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic

"... a gold mine of thought-provoking insight."
—C. Norman Shealy, MD, PhD, author of Energy Medicine and founding president of the American Holistic Medical Association

"Dr. Goldsmith's fine book challenges the orthodox paradigm of biomedicine and argues for a radical revision of medical thinking."
—James Lake, MD, author of Textbook of Integrative Mental Health Care and chair of the International Network of Integrative Mental Health

From the Publisher

2013-11-05
A homeopathic practitioner's philosophy of disease and wellness, which blames chronic illness on Western medicine's views of living beings as creations of physics and chemistry, functionally equivalent to inanimate things. For treating acute physical problems, Goldsmith accepts the efficacy of allopathic and anti-pathic approaches. But for mental illness and persistent physical illness, he sees the natural tendency of creatures to resist foreign invaders--e.g., diseases, pharmaceuticals or suggestions from psychiatrists--as more of a problem for the antagonistic, militarized approach of drug-based interventions. To utilize natural resistance instead of fighting it, Goldsmith recommends looking at the paradoxical, reverse psychology approaches derived from the work of Milton Erikson and Alfred Adler, which redirect a patient's unconscious patterns of resistance into conscious behavior to eradicate underlying problems. Goldsmith relates some of these same approaches to the basic tenets of homeopathy, such as treatment that focuses on the patient rather than the disease and that sees symptoms as teachers about the illness rather than as the core problem to be destroyed. He cites immunization as Western medicine's most significant foray into the paradoxical idea that a harmful body or substance--when in large doses--can be helpful in small doses by using the body's own resistance mechanisms to help itself; he then extends this discussion into an explanation of homeopathic methods, eventually connecting the idea of a low dose to that of an infinitesimal dose. Ultimately, his call, directed at family medicine and primary care practitioners, is to treat healing and wellness not as hard science but as soft science that acknowledges the role of the individual in his disease and his cure. "[D]issecting medicine's presumptions of scientific rationality…reveals a radically different, less commonsensical approach to healing," Goldsmith says. "But what seems to make the least sense, it turns out, may make the most sense." His clarity of thought and cleverness in moving the discussion of homeopathy from the near-mystical to the methodological makes this argument worth reading even if it's still difficult to stomach for the more scientifically minded. A compelling, well-presented though not entirely convincing argument for a more holistic view; after all, as the author says, people aren't cars, and bacteria aren't Nazis.

Kirkus Reviews