The study of the effect of "exceptional" experiences and beliefs on health--including anomalous, placebo, or hypnotic healing and mystical, religious, transpersonal, and creative experiences--is attracting increasing academic and public interest. This collection of essays explores the nature of mind, its impact on the body, and the relationship between "exceptional" experiences and physical health, mental health, and the potential for other types of perception. Examining the influence of spiritual practices, mental imagery, and alternative healing methods such as Reiki and Johrei, the essays encourage the expansion of mental health practice to include the full range of exceptional experiences. By normalizing experiences that are often pathologized, this book recognizes that exceptional human experiences can and do have value for physical and mental health.

How do we assess and manage the actual risks from water contamination? Can we learn from previous experiences? What can be done in future? This book is the proceedings of the fifth conference on this topic and addresses these issues relating to drinking water and drinking water systems. With emphasis on effectively and efficiently managing the risks and threats and sharing experiences, it provides information on successful use of leading-edge technologies and best practice both now and for the future. With contributions from leading scientists and experts in academia and industry it offers a truly international perspective on our ability to deal with water contamination emergencies. Emphasis is given to prevention, strategy and unusual emergency incident situations relating to drinking water. The book will appeal across a diverse group from public health professionals, water companies and water security experts and regulators.

Drawing on 40 years of research and patient care, Dr. Wayne Jonas explains how 80 percent of healing occurs organically and how to activate the healing process. In How Healing Works, Dr. Wayne Jonas lays out a revolutionary new way to approach injury, illness, and wellness. Dr. Jonas explains the biology of healing and the science behind the discovery that 80 percent of healing can be attributed to the mind-body connection and other naturally occurring processes. Jonas details how the healing process works and what we can do to facilitate our own innate ability to heal. Dr. Jonas's advice will change how we consume health care, enabling us to be more in control of our recovery and lasting wellness. Simple line illustrations communicate statistics and take-aways in a memorable way. Stories from Dr. Jonas's practice and studies further illustrate his method for helping people get well and stay well after minor and major medical events.

As Enlightenment notions of predictability, progress and the sense that humans could control and shape their environments informed European thought, catastrophes shook many towns to the core, challenging the new world view with dramatic impact. This book concentrates on a period marked by passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional village life to new bourgeois and even individualistic urbanism. The volume employs a broad definition of catastrophe, as it examines how urban communities conceived, adapted to, and were transformed by catastrophes, both natural and human-made. Competing views of gender figure in the telling and retelling of these analyses: women as scapegoats, as vulnerable, as victims, even as cannibals or conversely as defenders, organizers of assistance, inspirers of men; and men in varied guises as protectors, governors and police, heroes, leaders, negotiators and honorable men. Gender is also deployed linguistically to feminize activities or even countries. Inevitably, however, these tragedies are mediated by myth and memory. They are not neutral events whose retelling is a simple narrative. Through a varied array of urban catastrophes, this book is a nuanced account that physically and metaphorically maps men and women into the urban landscape and the worlds of catastrophe.

The importance of spiritual and religious frames of reference in making sense of and recovering from mental health difficulties is increasingly being recognized by mental health researchers. This book focuses on a variety of broad existential experiences. These are variously termed 'religious, 'spiritual', 'anomalous' 'extraordinary or exceptional experiences', or 'aberrant perceptions or beliefs' by researchers and health practitioners active in this field. In recognition of the burgeoning work in this area in recent years, this book brings together a broad range of approaches and perspectives to focus on an important set of topics that are important in demarcating this topic area.

Announcements for the following year included in some vols.

In Excellent Health offers an alternative view of the much maligned state of health care in America, using facts and peer-reviewed data to challenge the statistics often cited as evidence that medical care in the United States is substandard and poor in value relative to that of other countries. The author proposes a complete plan for reform in three critical areas of the health care puzzle—tax structure, private insurance markets, and government health insurance programs—designed to maintain choice and access to excellence and facilitate competition.