Recommended by Andrew Weil in Natural Health, Natural Medicine, Lupus Novice gives a moving account of the author's successful struggle with incurable SLE (systemic lupus erythematosus), affecting mostly women. Ms. Chester shares the personal discoveries behind her recovery, and a meditation on what it means for a body to be attacking itself. This enlarged edition updates her story and includes a foreword by the best-selling authority on immune-system disease: the author of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Dr. Jesse Stoff.Laura Chester has written a moving and significant book. On one level, she discusses her personal odyssey through the realm of a serious and inexplicable disease-its history, current cultural status, biology, symbolism, and the doctors of all persuasions who attempt to cure it. On another level, she speaks to the esoteric level of the disease, discussing the initiation into a deeper level of self and a journey through the unconscious and archetypal aspects of nature. On this level, she is an artist more than a patient, an individual who has the power to effect her cure.- Richard Grossinger, author of Planet Medicine

"Exploring what patients do want gives direction to the author's inquiry into what they should want. What patients want, he believes, is properly more complex and ambiguous than being "empowered." In this book he charts that ambiguity to take the autonomy principle past current pieties into the uncertain realities of the sick room and the hospital ward." "The Practice of Autonomy is a sympathetic but trenchant study of the animating principle of modern bioethics. It speaks with freshness, insight, and even passion to bioethicists and moral philosophers (about their theories), to lawyers (about their methods), to medical sociologists (about their subject), to policy-makers (about their ambitions), to doctors (about their work), and to patients (about their lives)."--BOOK JACKET.

The Lupus Foundation of America estimates that between .5 and 1.5 million people have been diagnosed with lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease that can attack any part of the body. The elusive nature of the illness often becomes a source of overwhelming helplessness and frustration to its victims, their loved ones, and the physicians who treat it. Narrated through both poetry and prose, Travels with the Wolf is an autobiographical account of Melissa Anne Goldstein's experiences with lupus. It is her story of becoming a young woman, writer, and teacher in the presence of severe, often debilitating disease. It is an exploration of her relationships with her family and friends as the illness steals into their lives, and the record of her struggle to maintain her independence and identity despite disease. Finally, it is an author's journey to find her spiritual core. This book is not just about lupus. Goldstein uses her experience of the illness as well as sociological, literary, and historical research, to portray and understand the dilemmas faced by the chronically ill person in our society. In her conclusion, she calls for reform of today's health care system, which does not meet the needs of the chronically ill or their physicians.

Serious illness and mortality, those most universal, unavoidable, and frightening of human experiences, are the focus of this pioneering study which has been hailed as a telling and provocative commentary on our times. As modern medicine has become more scientific and dispassionate, a new literary genre has emerged: pathography, the personal narrative concerning illness, treatment, and sometimes death. Hawkins's sensitive reading of numerous pathographies highlights the assumptions, attitudes, and myths that people bring to the medical encounter. One factor emerges again and again in these case studies: the tendency in contemporary medical practice to focus primarily not on the needs of the individual who is sick but on the condition that we call disease. Pathography allows the individual person a voice-one that asserts the importance of the experiential side of illness, and thus restores the feeling, thinking, experiencing human being to the center of the medical enterprise. Recommended for medical practitioners, the clergy, caregivers, students of popular culture, and the general reader, Reconstructing Illness demonstrates that only when we hear both the doctor's and the patient's voice will we have a medicine that is truly human.

This is a provocative look at writing by and about people with illness or disability—in particular HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, deafness, and paralysis—who challenge the stigmas attached to their conditions by telling their lives in their own ways and on their own terms. Discussing memoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays, and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical discourse. Responding to the recent growth of illness and disability narratives in the United States—such works as Juliet Wittman’s Breast Cancer Journal, John Hockenberry’s Moving Violations, Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, and Lou Ann Walker’s A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family—Couser addresses questions of both poetics and politics. He examines why and under what circumstances individuals choose to write about illness or disability; what role plot plays in such narratives; how and whether closure is achieved; who assumes the prerogative of narration; which conditions are most often represented; and which literary conventions lend themselves to representing particular conditions. By tracing the development of new subgenres of personal narrative in our time, this book explores how explicit consideration of illness and disability has enriched the repertoire of life writing. In addition, Couser’s discussion of medical discourse joins the current debate about whether the biomedical model is entirely conducive to humane care for ill and disabled people. With its sympathetic critique of the testimony of those most affected by these conditions, Recovering Bodies contributes to an understanding of the relations among bodily dysfunction, cultural conventions, and identity in contemporary America.

The best-selling books of Andrew Weil, "the guru of alternative medicine," (San Francisco Examiner) offer a comprehensive blend of traditional and alternative methods that help to achieve better health in the modern world. Natural Health, Natural Medicine is a comprehensive resource for everything you need to know to maintain optimum health and treat common ailments. This landmark book incorporates Dr. Weil's theories of preventive health maintenance and alternative healing into one extremely useful and readable reference, featuring general diet and nutrition information as well as simple recipes, answers to readers' most pressing questions, a catalogue of home remedies, invaluable resources, and hundreds of practical tips. This edition includes up-to-the-minute scientific findings and has been expanded to provide trustworthy advice about low-carb diets, hormone replacement therapy, Alzheimer's, attention deficit disorder, reflux disease, autism, type 2 diabetes, erectile dysfunction, the flu, and much more.

Seattle mental health counselor Lustbader here compells attention to and sympathy for those who must rely on caregivers for their needs. Stories are related by patients themselves. From incapacitated men and women we learn of the humiliations caused by the loss of autonomy, of the frustrations at not being able to manage on one's own. Accounts from widely different sorts of patients and those who begrudgingly or willingly see to their care provide graphic lessons in sensitivity.