by JoAnn L. Fogler

Healthy Healing; a Step-by-Step Guide to Healing over 300 Ailments Through Diet, Whole Herbs, Supplements and Exercise
14th Edition by Linda Page, PhD., Traditional Naturopath, and Sarah Abernathy

An alternative subtitle for this book could be: Avoid the Side Effects of Pharmaceutical Medications and Skyrocketing Medical Costs with America’s Original Guide to Natural Healing.

This is a comprehensive, user-friendly, detailed, and informative reference book. I hope to give a thumbnail bit of information about this marvelous volume in order to entice you to want to have it for your very own.

Linda Page’s career in natural health spans three decades. Her bestselling books are used as textbooks at higher education institutions. She holds degrees in Naturopathy and Holistic Nutrition from Birmingham, Alabama’s Clayton College of Natural Health. Sarah Abernathy has been a researcher, writer and herbal consultant in the field of natural health for over 15 years. She is a graduate of the East West School of Herbology.

Millions of copies of this book have been sold since it first went into publication in 1985. Healthy Healing is easy to use. It is well organized and has a great glossary of terms as well as a useful index to find the ailment that you are researching. Instead of searching many web sites and loads of headings, here you can find the ailment with its definition and solutions right at your fingertips. Enthusiasm for and interest in alternative medicine is exploding in America, say Page and Abernathy. They estimate that in 2011, sales of herbs and herbal products might surpass $5 billion!

These authors say that doctors receive no reward for maintaining health, only for treating illness. Despite everything we know today, many U.S. medical schools still don’t teach disease prevention, good nutrition, or exercise as part of health. Technological advances and prescription drugs have become the new health care frontier; both of which carry a tangled network of third party red tape, involve long waits, and lots of money. Natural healing, on the other hand, is a life style. Its goal, you will find in this book, is to give people the opportunity to live well.

No prescription is more valuable than knowledge. This book is a ready reference for the alternative healthcare choices open to those wishing to take more responsibility for their own well being. Page and Abernathy never say throw away your doctor’s phone number. We need choices from all healing modalities. These authors say it is time to return to Mother Nature. According to these two women, whenever there is a need, Nature provides the answer. “The natural healing rule of thumb is one month of healing for every year you’ve had the problem.” Naturopathy is founded on five therapeutic principles, reveal experts Page and Abernathy; these are: Nature is a powerful healing force, the person is viewed as a whole, the goal is to identify and address the cause of the problem, the naturopath is a teacher, and prevention is the approach.

These principles are explained in detail and well worth knowing for future good health. It is the lifestyle of the person that the naturopath is concerned with. Most of us reading this review will concur with this and hopefully will make it part of our healing and care. Various alternative therapies are detailed in Healthy Healing. The modalities described include massage therapy, biofeedback, magnet therapy, applied kinesiology, acupuncture and acupressure and spiritual healing such as meditation and prayer, to name a few. What I like is that not only does Healthy Healing offer explanations of various therapies, but who they might be appropriate for and who should avoid them.

Page and Abernathy go into detail on herbs and therapies which utilize herbs. They even talk about the interaction of drugs with herbs. They admit that there is much to learn about taking herbs and drugs together. They believe that most negative interactions occur when people use highly potent standardized herbs, take extremely high doses of herbs, or combine herbs and nutrients with drugs that have innate toxic properties and serious side effects.

Healthy Healing gives detailed descriptions of a wide variety of ailments and suggested treatments for each. The reference guide describes the symptoms that might be associated with an ailment, as well as the causes and progressive stages of an illness. Following that are recommendations to prevent, treat, and heal the ailment using a variety of modalities. The recommendations are intended to provide a reference for the variety of alternative options that might be appropriate for addressing a particular health issue.

The roles played by vitamins and minerals in wellness and healing are explained in Healthy Healing, and the best ways to obtain specific vitamins and minerals from foods. This book even goes into healthy diets for dogs and cats. Organic foods are explained as well as genetically engineered foods. This information is very important in the world we live in today. This book is one of few books that allow you to customize your own personalized natural health program for more than 400 ailments.

You can find Healthy Healing plus many herbs, food, and supplements at Tidal Creek Cooperative Food Market.