Timeless Healing Critique
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Timeless Healing Critique
In Timeless Healing Benson emphasizes the deep human need for faith, and explores what he finds to be a decisive role for belief in gathering the healing process. He offers important examples of patients for whom faith was an important factor in their recoveries.
Benson also states that "remembered wellness," his name for what is commonly known as the placebo effect, is a source of tremendous unused potential in the healing arts, and should be consciously enlightened in the practice of medicine. He reviews the wide-ranging scientific research supporting this idea, presenting in terms attainable to a general public, concepts which once lay mainly within the domain of specialists. According to Benson, the three components of remembered wellness are: belief and expectancy on the part of the patient, belief and expectancy on the part of the caregiver, and belief and expectancies generated by a relationship between the patient and the caregiver.
Keeping a person's beliefs positive is not always easy in a time when we are constantly battered by negative messages, mainly from advertising. As Benson puts it, "we harangue ourselves for not being perfect, for not living life with the panache portrayed in magazines or on TV. We adulate the firm-bodied, we exercise like zealots or wallow in guilt if we don't, choosing diet shakes over moderation . . ...