Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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54 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
Amazing Book, 26 Mar 2003
By A Customer
This is a one of those very special books that will be a well thumbed gem on your bookcase. The first part of the book is a little difficult to follow for the unscientific mind (mine!!) but what follows makes the jargon busting worth every minute. The first time I read this book was on holiday - and I couldn't put it down, these amazing concepts at last seem to have some scientific proof. There is not a week goes by that I do not recommend the book to a Client (I am a massage therapist working in rehabilitation). If there is one book to read, this is it.
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35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
Validation for bodyworkers, healers and other practitioners, 11 Mar 2007
At a meeting I went to Candace Pert said she didn't quite understand why complementary practitioners needed her to 'validate' their work, that surely the fact that we (and our clients) know it works (when it does!) is validation enough.
Perhaps she was just being modest here - I have to say that it is precisely the work of Candace Pert and others in the field that gives me, as a practitioner, a way to understand what is happening, and therefore a way of explaining to clients, in a clear way, what they may be experiencing, without it being 'spooky wooky - woo, you must be a healer' - which can be disempowering or frightening to the client, depending on their belief system 'the practitioner healed me' and also places burdens on the practitioner's view of themselves.
Medical science also needed to understand 'what is going on' - and the respectability now of Psycho Neuro Immunology as a concept - due, in very large part, to Pert's work - means that without necessarily having any greater understanding of, or belief in, what 'goes on' in particularly bodywork and healing sessions, there is a greater willingness to suggest patients utilise this as adjuncts to conventional medicine.
The placebo effect is finally achieving respectability in its own right - how the mind and body can affect each other, positively, is being engaged with.
And .........on a slightly more humorous note, I have found it very useful to be able to blind a funding body with 'science' (which they didn't particularly understand) in order to get funding for one particular area where I work. This wasn't unethical, I had been asked to provide validation, and so had decided to ask clients to give subjective feedback of improvements in certain symptoms. A wiser person than myself said 'don't do that - provide some complicated science, they will be far more impressed'. So, to come back to Candace Pert's 'you don't need me to validate your work' - well, actually, we do!
And...........for the non-scientific, this is actually a VERY clear and readable account of neurochemistry. Having struggled hard to wade through some scientific papers, eyes crossed and with wet towel clamped firmly to head, Pert was a breath of fresh air!
Her individual journey is explored, and this is also very valid - there is of course a whole debate around how 'the observer' influences the experiment, so Pert's acknowledgement of WHO the scientist in the equation is utterly pertinent. The 'healer' and the 'client' engage together in a process - of course this does provide some stumbling blocks to the old double blind cross over randomised study, as the 'in the moment, this client, this therapist' is hugely central.
Very powerful book
However - Amazon, you have it wrong, this book 'Molecules of Emotion' is by Candace Pert - not Deepak Chopra - DC (wonderful though his work is) just wrote the foreword - there's somehow some sort of synchronicity going on here - often in 'science' the work of a woman scientist in the field gets unacknowledged or sidelines - cf Rosalind Franklyn's role in the 'discovery' of DNA.
Yes, yes, I know Amazon aren't doing this deliberately, its an annoying inputting blip which means that a lot of books with Forewords end up being credited to the foreword writer, rather than the author, due to the foreword writer being listed first.
I just thought it was amusingly illustrative in this case!
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38 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
You need not fall asleep reading about ligands., 26 Feb 2001
By A Customer
This was an extremely readable book. It is semi-autobioggraphical, but some of the biography sets out the historical context against which research was taking place. The overall thrust of the book relates to receptor sites and ligands and shows how the nervous system is connected with both the endocrine and immune systems in ways not previously understood. Pert describes her struggles against sexism, entrenched ideas, and orthodoxy. One of the story lines in this book concerns Ms Pert's research into receptor sites and ligands which threw up an effective treatment for HIV, an easily synthesised polypeptide that would block one of the receptor sites by which the virus gains access to the body. Pert describes her 10 year struggle to get funding for research trials. A few sad bits, but generally an interesting and fun read.
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