Depression-Free for Life [antikvár]

PrefaceMy Odyssey from Ivy League Physician to Holistic HealerMedicine has always fascinated mewhen I was only four years old I told my parents I wanted to be a doctor. My friends in grade school liked to put together model cars and planes, but I preferred working on models of the human body and playing with chemistry kits. When I was in high school, I built a primitive heart-lung machine that won the top award in the state science fair. In my football career in high school and as captain of the football team at Amherst College, I served as the teams' unofficial physician and learned a great deal about bumps, bruises, sprains, and broken bones.At Columbia Medical School in the late 1960s, I realized that I found broken minds and souls more fascinating than broken bones. The cultural trends at the time, such as the burgeoning interest in meditation. Far Eastern spirituality, and mind-body techniques, were slow to seep into medicine, but they offered intriguing insights into human health. Pioneering doctors like Hans Selye had begun to conclusively demonstrate that a person's inner experiences, particularly how he or she reacts to stress, could dramatically affect aspects of bodily health, such as the risk of suffering from heart disease.I came to medical school having already co-authored a biochemistry research article and was all set to become a researcher-internist. I slowly came to the realization that many doctors had little idea about how to get from illness to health, or about what people should do to stay