Power of Hope or MedicineMagic and Religion

Power of Hope: A Doctor's Perspective

Author: Howard M Spiro

In this book an eminent physician explores how patients and caring doctors can help lessen suffering when illness occurs. Dr. Howard Spiro urges that physicians focus on their patients' feelings of pain and anxiety as well as on physical symptoms. He also suggests that patients and their doctors be receptive to the emotional relief that may be obtained from nature and from hope. Drawing on his previous highly praised work on the doctor-patient relationship and the problem of pain, Dr. Spiro tells how people can be helped by a combination of alternative medicine and mainstream medicine - a treatment of mind, body, and spirit that energizes patients, strengthens their expectations, and starts them on the road to feeling better. In various forms of alternative medicine, from meditation to massage, from faith healing to folk medicine, from herbology to homeopathy, practitioners heed patients' complaints and help them to help themselves.

Journal of the American Medical Association

The author's arguments are magnificently developed with a strong thread of logic holding them together, producing what should be an eye-opening exploration of the many issues facing the contemporary medical practitioner in general and the medical educator in particular. I encourage those seeking intellectual challenge to spend the necessary time to study this text and think about the implications and conclusions that derive from Dr Spiro's exploration.

Table of Contents:

	Preface
1	Introduction	1
2	The Placebo Drama	13
3	The Physician	25
4	Pills and Procedures	38
5	The Patient and the Disease: Pharmacology and Faith	46
6	What Placebos Can Do	71
7	Patients and Pain	90
8	Autonomy and Responsibility: Three Patients	103
9	Objections to Placebos	113
10	Alternative Medicine	132
11	Placebos, Alternative Medicine, and Healing	154
12	Why Doctors Don't Like Placebos	182
13	How Placebos May Work	198
14	The Patient-Physician Relationship: Loyalty as Guide	217
15	The Promise of the Placebo	227
	Notes	247
	Works Cited	257
	Other References	275
	Index	279

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Medicine,Magic and Religion

Author: W H R Rivers

One of the most fascinating men of his generation, W.H.R. Rivers was a British doctor and psychiatrist as well as a leading ethnologist. Immortalized as the hero of Pat Barker's award-winning Regeneration trilogy, Rivers was the clinician who, in the First World War, cared for the poet Siegfried Sassoon and other infantry officers injured on the western front. His researches into the borders of psychiatry, medicine and religion made him a prominent member of the British intelligentsia of the time, a friend of H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell. Part of his appeal lay in an extraordinary intellect, mixed with a very real interest in his fellow man. Medicine, Magic and Religion is a prime example of this. A social institution, it is one of Rivers' finest works. In it, Rivers introduced the then revolutionary idea that indigenous practices are indeed rational, when viewed in terms of religious beliefs.

Robert Graves

The restraint, power and fineness of Rivers' mind make it impossible to be patient with critics who feel uncomfortable in the presence of his greatness.

Siegfried Sassoon

I should like to meet Rivers in "the next world". It is difficult to believe that such a man as he could be extinguished.

Nation

Always, as we read, we feel we are in close contact with a mind that is really thinking.

Times Literary Supplement

Despite the distinction and variety of his scientific achievements, only those personally acquainted with him can fully appreciate the causes of that profound respect with which he was regarded ...Medicine, Magic and Religion is a document of first-rate importance ... and it will thus remain as a worthy monument to its distinguished author.

Times Literary Supplement

Despite the distinction and variety of his scientific achievements, only those personally acquainted with him can fully appreciate the causes of that profound respect with which he was regarded ...Medicine, Magic and Religion is a document of first-rate importance ... and it will thus remain as a worthy monument to its distinguished author.