- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn's diseaseāa chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn's to consider how Western medicine's turn from an "art of healing" toward a "science of medicine" deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing's role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Prologue: Invoking Healing
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Shit
- Overture: Healing as Desire and Value
- One: Healing Tendencies
- Two: We Are More Complicated Than We Know
- Three: We Are More Imaginative Than We Think
- Four: When We Learn to Heal, It Matters
- Coda: Healing with COVID, or Why Medicine is Not Enough
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index