The Art of Healing: Uncovering Your Inner Wisdom and Potential for Self-Healing
By Bernie S. Siegel, MD; New World Library

Whether or not you enjoy this book has little to do with how well it is written. Rather, it depends on whether you relish a doctor frankly revealing his own challenges and fears as a caregiver, a near-death-experience survivor, a star surgeon who advises patients to ponder their divinity, a dog lover who communicates psychically with his pets, and a devoted son whose dead father has delivered messages in dreams.

For all those who idolize (and thus dehumanize) physicians as omnipotent, emotionless wielders of life and death, Siegel’s disarming disclosures about clairvoyance, the healing power of art, and his spirit guide, George, will be as jarring as those moments when film actors “break the fourth wall” and start speaking, as themselves, into the lens.

Siegel’s “carefrontation” protocol for cancer patients and his other medicospiritually radical strategies—which emerged from epiphanies about a “greater intelligence . . . that allows cells to communicate inside the human body,” revealing that they want to heal—have gained international renown and yielded remarkable real-life results.

Is this the actual alt-med revolution?

“Nothing in my training as a physician taught me to understand that all life-forms emit a mirror image of invisible conscious energy at the subatomic quantum level,” Siegel explains in this part memoir, part manual packed with engaging anecdotes, “or that this energy can be communicated by individuals through psychic or intuitive methods.”

His prescription? Joy.

“I ask seniors to tell me how they can die laughing,” Siegel reveals.

Heck, it beats crying.