Slow Medicine (Hope and Healing for Chronic Illness)

What would you do with your life if your health were completely restored?

Slow Medicine will gently guide you off the treadmill of quick fixes and onto the path of lasting wellness.

Are you as healthy as you could be, as healthy as you would like to be? Do you wake up feeling rested? Do you feel physically attractive? Do you give yourself more supportive messages than critical ones? Is the home you live in harmonious? Is your job fulfilling? Are you able to let go of your attachment to specific outcomes and embrace uncertainty? Are you free from disease?

How nice would it feel to be that healthy, to achieve extraordinary health! Integrative medicine pioneer Dr. Michael Finkelstein has helped tens of thousands of patients get there with his Slow Medicine prescription of skillful living. In this refreshing new book, he asks the questions and helps you develop the skills you need, so as to manage your own recovery from the vast array of ailments and illnesses that often go unresolved in the modern American health care system. He then illuminates a path that will help you put these health challenges into an entirely new context, seeing beyond the symptoms and reaching a state of health that might otherwise seem impossible—a functional state of well-being that lab reports can’t begin to measure.

Drawing on decades of medical experience and patient consultations, as well as a good dose of common sense and practical wisdom, Dr. Finkelstein guides you through the essential questions for understanding various symptoms, their causes, and a path you may never have thought would lead you to solutions. Each chapter in this boundary-shattering book includes the key components of a successful consultation—from revealing lessons to practical prescriptions—along with illustrative anecdotes from real patients.

In this warm, reassuring, enlightening book, Dr. Finkelstein takes you beyond conventional medicine to examine the intricate network of factors that lie behind many common illnesses—and empowers you to take your health back. It’s time to walk down the Slow Medicine path, one where the answers are in the questions.