Books

Back in Control –Seattle spinal surgeon Dr. David Hanscom focuses on an aspect of chronic pain that the medical world has largely overlooked: you must calm your nervous system in order to get better. More than any other book about pain, Back in Control reveals how to quiet a turbocharged central nervous system and make a full recovery, with or without surgery. Dr. Hanscom shares the story of his own journey out of chronic pain and offers a treatment paradigm that has evolved from his personal experience, as well what he has learned from his patients,  hundreds of whom have moved beyond managing pain to becoming pain free. This book will enable those suffering from chronic pain to regain control of their care and life.This revised 2^nd edition reflects the last few years of neuroscience research. It is becoming increasingly clear that the brain processes mental and physical pain in a similar manner. As anxiety drops, pain will diminish. Dr. Hanscom has observed that these principles apply to any chronic pain condition.

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How – Dan Coyle is a journalist who has looked at “outbreaks of talent” over the last 500 years. Talent is created, not born. He describes three key components: 1) deep learning 2) ignition 3) master coaching. What makes this book relevant to chronic pain is that he links his findings to the last decade of neuroscience research. He clearly describes how the nervous lays down repeatable pathways. The same principles apply to anxiety, pain, and frustration.  This book is not only entertaining, it will change your concept of how your neural pathways are formed and you will better understand the tools that are effective in creating new functional circuits that do not include pain. Read one patient’s experience with this book

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy – Cognitive behavioral therapy is a field of psychology that assumes that one must have an anxiety producing thought to elicit a feeling of anxiety. David Burns has written a book that I feel is the cornerstone of the mental health pathway in healing from chronic pain. He presents many methods of restructuring your thinking processes. As you implement the tools your brain will form more functional neurological pathways. Your pain is affected both by your nervous system “calming down” and the alternate pathways not including pain. With commitment and repetition, this book alone can have a dramatic effect both on your pain and your sense of well being. David Burn’s

Forgive for Good – Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting, insists Fred Luskin in Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness, nor does it mean condoning bad behavior. What it does mean is that you “take your hurt less personally, take responsibility for how you feel, and become a hero instead of a victim in the story you tell.” Luskin, a practicing psychologist and cofounder of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project, shows why forgiveness is important for mental and physical health, explains how to form a grievance and suggests practical steps for healing. He uses examples from his clinical practice including instances of broader cultural grievances like those between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland in this solidly researched and convincing guide.

The Way to Love – This book contains the final flowering of Anthony de Mello’s thought, and in it he grapples with the ultimate question of love. In thirty-one meditations, he implores his readers with his usual pithiness to break through illusion, the great obstacle to love. “Love springs from awareness,” de Mello insists, saying that it is only when we see others as they are that we can begin to really love. But not only must we seek to see others with clarity, we must examine ourselves without misconception. The task, however, is not easy. “The most painful act,” de Mello says, “is the act of seeing. But in that act of seeing that love is born.” Anthony De Mello was the director of the   Sadhana Institute of Pastoral Counseling in Poona, India, and authored several books.

Unlearn Your Pain – Unlearn Your Pain describes the “Mind Body Syndrome”. It is a clinical chronic pain syndrome where your brain translates prior traumatic events in patients’ lives directly into physical symptoms. Dr. Schubiner illustrates the problem with many compelling stories. He offers a 28-day course consisting of writing and mindfulness that helps uncover the source of the symptoms and allows the patient to move on. Often the results are dramatic. It is another dimension of the reprogramming process that can break up these unconsciousness neurological circuits.   Link to Dr. Schubiner’s website

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity – Allen, a management consultant and executive coach, provides insights into attaining maximum efficiency and at the same time relaxing whenever one needs or wants to. Readers learn that there is no single means for perfecting organizational efficiency or productivity; rather, the author offers tools to focus energies strategically and tactically without letting anything fall through the cracks. He provides tips, techniques, and tricks for implementation of his workflow management plan, which has two basic components: capture all the things that need to get done into a workable, dependable system; and discipline oneself to make front-end decisions with an action plan for all inputs into that system. In short, do it (quickly), delegate it (appropriately), or defer it. This road map for organizational efficiency may help many who have too much to do in too little time, both professionally and in their personal lives.

The Pain Antidote: The Proven Program to Help You Stop Suffering from Chronic Pain, Avoid Addiction to Painkillers–and Reclaim Your Life – If you are one of the 100 million people who suffer from chronic pain, you may be feeling hopeless and helpless, relying on endless medications that don’t work, feeling worse and worse. But there is hope—and help. The innovative program at the acclaimed Las Vegas Recovery Center, at which Dr. Mel Pohl is Medical Director, has helped thousands of sufferers to reduce chronic pain without the use of painkillers. The Pain Antidote shares this program’s concrete tools and strategies, offering: cutting-edge research on how pain affects your brain; how your emotions affect your experience of pain; a comprehensive program, including a four-week Jump Start plan; pain-reducing gentle exercises and health-supporting foods, and much more.

Parent Effectiveness Training: The Proven Program for Raising Responsible Children – Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.), began almost forty years ago as the first national parent-training program to teach parents how to communicate more effectively with kids and offer step-by-step advice to resolving family conflicts so everybody wins. This classic is the most studied, highly praised, and proven parenting program in the world — and it will work for you. Whether you have a toddler striking out for independence or a teenager who has already started rebelling, you’ll find P.E.T. a compassionate, effective way to instill responsibility and create a nurturing family environment in which your child will thrive.

8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back: Natural Posture Solutions for Pain in the Back, Neck, Shoulder, Hip, Knee, and Foot (Remember When It Didn’t Hurt) – Through her experience in healing her own back pain, coupled with extensive training and research, Esther Gokhale has developed a technique to alleviate back pain–the Gokhale Method. She has helped thousands of people re-learn the way their bodies were designed to move–gracefully and with ease. She has spent fifteen years teaching the technique, honing it for clarity and efficiency, and presents it in her book for general use. Many physicians now refer their back patients to her, and almost all the patients start to improve from the first lesson. In many cases the results are dramatic. This book provides you with step-by-step instructions and demonstrations of her technique.

Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness – “Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can’t control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible.” The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was born on the eastern edges of the Roman Empire in A.D. 55, but The Art of Living is still perfectly suited for any contemporary self-help or recovery program. To prove the point, this modern interpretation by Sharon Lebell casts the teachings in up-to-date language, with phrases like “power broker” and “casual sex” popping up intermittently. But the core is still the same: Epictetus keeps the focus on progress over perfection, on accomplishing what can be accomplished and abandoning unproductive worry over what cannot. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants – This autobiography is of an elder statesman in the field of reconstructive surgery, Paul Brand. The son of missionaries in India, he became acquainted with leprosy and its appalling effects in his early life. He trained and qualified as an orthopedic hand surgeon in London.  He was one of the first physicians to commit his life to working with lepers as they historically had been shunned by the medical profession.  He discovered that the cause of the severe deformities in leprosy and later diabetes was the lack of protective sensation. His insights into pain arise from working with people who could not feel pain.  I personally knew him and he is one of the most inspiring people I have ever known.

Victory Over Verbal Abuse: A Healing Guide to Renewing Your Spirit and Reclaiming Your Life – Verbal abuse is an insidious behavior that permeates our culture–from the privacy of our own homes to the public glare of our schools, workplaces, and other institutions.   But you don’t have to live with it. In this groundbreaking companion to her bestselling The Verbally Abusive Relationship, acclaimed public speaker, educator and author Patricia Evans brings you the tools you need to triumph over verbal abuse, no matter where or how you encounter it.  She’ll guide you step by step through a powerful healing process.  With Patricia’s help, you’ll achieve the clarity you need to build a new life–far from senseless accusations, wounding words, and confusing comments that have taken an untold toll on your psyche. You’ll find validation, and learn to believe in yourself–and a better future–once more.

Feeling Good Together: The Secret to Making Troubled Relationships Work – In his bestselling book, Feeling Good, Dr. David Burns introduced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a clinically proven, drug-free therapy that has revolutionized the treatment of clinical depression throughout the world. Now, in Feeling Good Together, he presents Cognitive Interpersonal Therapy, a radical new approach that will help you transform troubled, conflicted relationships into successful, happy ones.   Dr. Burns’ method for improving these relationships is easy and surprisingly effective. Based on twenty-five years of clinical experience and groundbreaking research on more than 1,000 individuals, Feeling Good Together presents an entirely new theory of why we have so much trouble getting along with each other. The book is filled with helpful examples and brilliant, user-friendly tools such as the Relationship Satisfaction Test, the Relationship Journal, the Five Secrets of Effective Communication, the Intimacy Exercise, and more, so you can enjoy far more loving and satisfying relationships with the people you care about.

Man’s Search for Meaning – Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl’s theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos (“meaning”)—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.

Journey into Love : Ten Steps to Wholeness – Often our natural vitality and expansiveness are blocked by patterns of which we are not even fully aware. This book shows how to identify these patterns and take practical steps to stop constraining our lives. It is a practical guide to steps we each need to take to heal and blossom into our own true nature as compassionate, spiritual human beings. In this adventure, the authors bring lessons from work with thousands of people in different cultures, revealing how to go beyond the “negative love” syndrome and find our own power, wisdom and voice. Clear, simple, yet profound knowledge and practical tools to free your heart and spirit–a gift of love to anyone on a healing path.

Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart – Growing up in the high desert of California, Jim Doty was poor, with an alcoholic father and a mother chronically depressed and paralyzed by a stroke. Today he is the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, of which the Dalai Lama is a founding benefactor. But back then his life was at a dead end until at twelve he wandered into a magic shop looking for a plastic thumb. Instead he met Ruth, a woman who taught him a series of exercises to ease his own suffering and manifest his greatest desires. Her final mandate was that he keep his heart open and teach these techniques to others. She gave him his first glimpse of the unique relationship between the brain and the heart. Doty would go on to put Ruth’s practices to work with extraordinary results—power and wealth that he could only imagine as a twelve-year-old, riding his orange Sting-Ray bike. But he neglects Ruth’s most important lesson, to keep his heart open, with disastrous results—until he has the opportunity to make a spectacular charitable contribution that will virtually ruin him. Part memoir, part science, part inspiration, and part practical instruction, Into the Magic Shop shows us how we can fundamentally change our lives by first changing our brains and our hearts.

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