mentary treatments help control symptoms, reduce
stress, or improve well-being.” Furthermore the
term integrative medicinerefers to “combinations of
complementary and evidence-based treatment.”
(www.cancer.org/eprise/main/docroot/ETO/con-
tent/ETO_5_1_Introduction).
A recent U.S. Senate hearing was held on alter-
native medicine practices, many of which are still
resented or denounced by the American Medical
Association. But many medical schools through-
out the country now see fit to include courses on
patients’ emotional issues, nutrition (not histori-
cally a standard medical-school course), and the
like, and acknowledge that, indeed, there is a
mind-body connection working at top speed.
Many physicians have produced books and arti-
cles on alternative, complementary, and integra-
tive practice in the name of “medical freedom,” as
Burton Goldberg, editor of Alternative Medicine: A
Definitive Guide (Celestial Arts, Berkeley, Calif.,
2002), put it, and many have acquired additional
degrees and certification in alternative methods.
Dr. Bernie Siegel, a renowned oncologist and
best-selling author, documented his experiences
with what he says is obviously a connection
between the palpable, visible, audible human
body and mysterious forces and mechanisms
interpreted as “mind.” Other physicians who have
had the courage to come forward and report their
findings that support this concept include Dr.
Deepak Chopra, Dr. Larry Dossey, Dr. Andrew
Weil, Dr. Brian Weiss, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross,
Dr. Wayne Dyer, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. C. Norman
Shealy, and hundreds of others. Finally, in the
21st century, mind-body ideas not only have
resurfaced, but also have established themselves
much as they were set forth by the ancients—
Imhotep, Galen, Plato, Aristotle, to name a few—
and by prominent figures such as Florence
Nightingale, who wrote that health is a balance of
body, mind, and spirit, and that illness may as eas-
ily be caused by emotional needs as by a disease.
Richard Gerber, M.D., author of A Practical
Guide to Vibrational Medicine(Quill / HarperCollins
Publishers, New York, 2000), brings Nightingale’s
ideas to the fore not only in terms of holism, but
in terms of the latest scientific thinking. “Accord-
ing to the new perspective of Einsteinian and
quantum physics, the biochemical molecules that
make up the physical body are actually a form of
vibrating energy,” Gerber wrote. “During the
early part of the twentieth century, Albert Ein-
stein came up to the startling conclusion that mat-
ter and energy were actually interconvertible and
interchangeable. His famous E = mc 2 mathemati-
cally described how matter and energy were
interrelated. Einstein said matter and energy
were, in fact, two different forms of the same
thing. At the time Einstein came up with this con-
clusion, few scientists could entirely understand
its magnitude.... Since all energy vibrates and
oscillates at different rates, then, at least at the
atomic level, the human body is really composed
of different kinds of vibrating energy.... [V]ibra-
tional medicine is an approach to the diagnosis
and treatment of illness based upon the idea that
we are all unique energy systems.... The concept
of the body as a complex energetic system is part
of a new scientific worldview gradually gaining
acceptance in the eyes of modern medicine.”
And in the eyes of mainstream America as
well. In the spirit of Frank Sinatra’s affable
remark, “I’m for whatever gets you through the
night,” it has been reported that eight of 10
patients have tried alternative treatments, and of
those, three-quarters reported success. Given the
thousands upon thousands of alternative practi-
tioners, Americans seem more than willing to try
“whatever works.” Often this means combining
traditional Western medicine with alternatives. In
his book, Radical Healing: Integrating the World’s
Great Therapeutic Traditions to Create a New Transfor-
mative Medicine, Rudolph Ballentine, M.D., says
that the integration and interaction of Western
and Eastern medicines make for an exciting path:
“ ‘Radical Healing’ is built on these unifying con-
cepts; they are the practical essence of a medicine
that is simple and universal, rooted in the peren-
nial principle of healing as personal evolution,”
Ballentine wrote. “Each of the great healing tradi-
tions has arisen in its own culture to help resolve
problems peculiar to that setting, so each—e.g.,
Ayurveda, homeopathy, Traditional Chinese Med-
icine, European and Native American herbology,
nutrition, and psychotherapeutic bodywork—has
its weaknesses as well as strengths. By integratingxviii The Encyclopedia of Complementary and Alternative Medicine