Specialists estimate that as many as 60 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, and approximately 20 percent of the population in most developed countries reports having chronic pain. According to one study, chronic back pain alone afflicts more than four million Americans, and nearly 50 percent of these are disabled by it. Pain is the most frequent cause of disability in the United States, with as many as 50 million Americans on short- or long-term disability leave from work at any one time. As these figures suggest, chronic pain is extremely difficult to treat successfully—it is a complex and baffling phenomenon, poorly understood even in the medical centers devoted to its diagnosis and treatment. In Heal the Pain, Comfort the Spirit Dorene O'Hara, an anesthesiologist with extensive training in pain management and clinical pharmacology, explores treatment techniques developed over many years of studying, treating, and lecturing on chronic pain. She also examines the important contributions made by other clinical professionals and by practitioners of alternative medicine. Combining a general survey of the forms of pain therapy with suggestions for how patients can find the most appropriate treatment plan for themselves, Heal the Pain, Comfort the Spirit provides needed answers for pain sufferers as well as practitioners.

An Integrative Approach to Counseling: Bridging Chinese Thought, Evolutionary Theory, and Stress Management offers a global and integrative approach to counseling that incorporates multiple concepts and techniques from both eastern and western perspectives. The book identifies commonalities rather than the differences between them. The book also compares and contrasts the underlying cultural assumptions of western counseling with those of the Chinese perspectives of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, relative to integrating and applying a more global approach to helping individuals functionally adapt to challenges in their environments. The book will be used by faculty and students in those advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology, counseling, or social work that cover such areas as introduction to counseling, counseling skills and techniques, counseling theories, multi-cultural awareness and counseling, and stress management.

“Braude has discovered a crucial link between the early feminists and the spiritualists who so captured the American imagination.” —Los Angeles Times In Radical Spirits, Ann Braude contends that the early women’s rights movement and Spiritualism went hand in hand. Her book makes a convincing argument for the importance of religion in the study of American women’s history. In this new edition, Braude discusses the impact of the book on the scholarship of the last decade and assesses the place of religion in interpretations of women’s history in general and the women’s rights movement in particular. A review of current scholarship and suggestions for further reading make it even more useful for contemporary teachers and students. “It would be hard to imagine a book that more insightfully combined gender, social, and religious history together more perfectly than Radical Spirits. Braude still speaks powerfully to unique issues of women’s creativity—spiritual as well as political—in a superb account of the controversial nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement.” —Jon Butler, Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University “Continually rewarding.” —The New York Times Book Review “A fascinating, well-researched, and scholarly work on a peripheral aspect of the rise of the American feminist movement.” —Library Journal “A vitally important book . . . [that] has . . . influenced a generation of young scholars.” —Marie Griffith, associate director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University “An insightful book and a delightful read.” —Journal of American History