Healing and the Mind

In this intriguing companion volume to a PBS TV series, Moyers explores the roles of thoughts and emotions in illness and health through interviews with 16 doctors and scientists. He visits stress-reduction clinics and a cancer patients' support group, and he investigates the new field of psychoneuroimmunology, which emphasizes the importance of patients' attitudes to optimal immune-system functioning. He also travels to China to study acupuncture, therapeutic massage and chi gong , the manipulation of vital energy to ameliorate chronic neurologic and muscular diseases. Among those interviewed are University of California physician Dean Ornish, who has reversed heart disease in patients with treatments combining meditation, stress-reduction exercises, group therapy, walking and vegetarian diet; neurobiologist David Felten, discoverer of nerve fibers that link the nervous system to the immune system; and Thomas Delbanco of Harvard Medical School who seeks ways to transform the doctor-patient relationship so that patients are more actively involved. Color and black-and-white reproductions of art by Kathe Kollwitz, Rene Magritte, Norman Rockwell, Paul Klee and others interact suggestively with the text. (Feb.)