The Healing Power of Illness: Understanding What Your Symptoms are Telling You: Understanding What Your Symptoms Are Telling You

"I absolutely love this book, its very insightful and very practical. I love the way I always find something amazing, that I had never considered within its pages (and I have read many similar style books as a Complementary Practitioner). The bases of the book is how our physical symptoms are a manifestation of what is going on in other levels, but its written not in a Louise Hay approach at all (which at times I found a little too 'new-age' for me), but in a practical and grounded way which is accessible to anyone, often referring to the clues in the phrases we use within the English language. I agree with the last reviewer, its a book that everyone should read, especially those involved in the health care profession.

I would give it a 5 though it doesn't cover everything that I would have liked to have seen. But it does a great job of what is there."
~ Written on 2008-08-18

"This is a profoundly challenging book.

It looks at our shadow-side, and says that illness is an expression of feelings or issues which we are not willing or able to express in any other way.

The basic premise is that every illness has a profound spiritual or emotional purpose.

There is a lot of stuff at the beginning about re-incarnation, which you can read or ignore as you see fit. And there is some fascinating, but not necessarily essential stuff about how the human mind tends to polarise things to oppostites (good-bad, black-white, richer-poorer, sickness-health).

But I find it hard to escape the underlying question which the book poses of why - if twenty people are exposed to a virus - do two specific people become ill? What is the difference in those two people which lets them fall ill?

There are a lot of other challenging questions which the book implies but does not explicitly pose. If a particular illness (which is a tool for expression) is expunged from the world, then how will people express the same thing in the future? This goes some way to explain the rise and rise of non-viral illnesses like cancer, and immuno-suppression illneses like AIDS.

This is a book which every health-worker, every therapist, every body-worker and every doctor should read. This is also a book for everyone who is dealing with every kind of illness.

It does not promise that if you 'understand' the emotional or spiritual cause of your illness you will become miraculously better. But it does help you understand and deal with your own illness in the context of your own life, and the illness of others in the context of theirs.

As I have said, this is one of the books which I give to people again and again.

Update: 2008 - I've changed my opinion of the subject this book covers and now take a less mystical view of things. I've kept my copy of the book though, and only partly because I like its discussion of polarised thinking. If you want a quasi-mystical explanation of illness then it is everything I've said and more. Read it if you want to think about the meaning of life, but go to your doctor if you are ill! "
~ Written on 2002-06-30