Since the first suffering supplicant offered a prayer to his god or the first mother cradled an ailing child in her caring arms, we have witnessed how human health and healing goes beyond any inventory of parts and infusion of chemicals. We humans are a complex melding of thought, emotion, spirit, and energy and each of those components is as critical to our well-being as our physiological status. Even if we are just beginning to quantify and document these seemingly intangible aspects, to ignore them in the practice of medicine is neglect and an invitation to do harm.

Now in its second edition, The Scientific Basis of Integrative Medicine continues to provide doctors and other health practitioners with information on complementary and alternative approaches to health, that is authoritative, scientifically based, and epidemiologically substantiated. Written for doctors and healthcare professionals by pioneering practitioners and updated with the newest research across an increasing range of possibilities, the new edition of this bestselling work –

• Establishes the scientific basis for the mind–body connection and then documents the puissant interactions of the endocrine, immune, nervous, and stress systems that so profoundly influence our lives
• Examines that healing dimension of spirituality, which informs but transcends the five senses
• Investigates how hope, faith, and love aid healing
• Discusses how the emotional presence of a practitioner affects patient outcome
• Considers the incorporation of a unified theory that can account for the existence of health enhancing energy fields within ― as well as outside ― the human body

Integral physiology serves as a bridge between Western medical knowledge and the equally valuable, but less well-recognized, Eastern systems of medicine. The authors refer to it as integrative because it combines important Western biological knowledge with forms of healing that incorporate the mental and emotional, and spiritual aspects that are essential to health, because those aspects are what make us essentially human.