The spiritual factors associated with healing are increasingly being acknowledged by modern medicine. Our definition of what constitutes health has expanded beyond the purely medical, yet the delivery of modern medicine to the patient often fails to take this into account. Doctors, anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists have all written on the subject, but thus far the literature has been fragmented between the disciplines.David Aldridge presents the first unified approach to the subject. In Spirituality, Healing and Medicine he evaluates the existing literature from across the disciplines to ascertain just how effective and influential spiritual healing may be on the patient's physical and psychological well-being. He encourages us to redefine treatment strategies and the ways in which we understand health, and argues that the spiritual elements of experience help the patient to find purpose, meaning and hope in the face of sickness. It is in the understanding of suffering and the need for deliverance from it, he suggests, that the traditions and aims of medicine and spirituality meet.
1. Healing narratives in the context of a performed life. 2. Meaning, purpose and power. 3. Religion: The everyday forms of spiritual life. 4. Lifestyle, charismatic ideology and a praxis aesthetic. 5. Lost and found. The perpetual story. 6. Prayer and healing. 7. Pluralism and treatment: Healing today. Index.
The great value of this book is that it reveals the new insights that can be gained by viewing sickness in its social setting and regarding health and illness not as inflictions from without, but as performances which are being constantly enacted by individuals within their social environment. This is the thesis which the author developed in his earlier books on music therapy and suicide. It is a welcome change of outlook: a philosophy of hope which offers the continuing opportunity of healing by changed perceptions and behavioural responses. The book discusses the use of prayer, meditation and therapeutic touch, but as the author stresses it ""is not an evangelical tract for spiritual healing, simply an argument for diversity in the culture of health care that includes the spiritual."" The development of this argument raises several important issues. It offers the promise that the growing use of complementary therapies will help to narrow the gap between the users and providers of health care. It also suggests that health and sickness can often be different ways of reacting to a given situation rather than opposite poles of a sick-well continuum.
