Product Description

Understanding Disease explains with a minimum of jargon how diseases occur, what the main symptoms are, and how they may affect us. Complete with illustrations, this concise guide is written for those working in alternative medicine and those without a medical background who want a clearer understanding of the ways in which common illnesses develop and the terms used to describe them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51171 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From the Publisher
An accessible guide to health, pathology and disease written for the non-medical therapist

About the Author
John Ball is a former GP and now a Devon-based practitioner of the alternatives who has lectured and taught at schools and colleges of complementary medicine around the UK.

Customer Reviews

Doesn't meet the stated objectives
Written by a medical doctor who now practises alternative medicine, this book is claimed to explain diseases for practitioners of alternative medicine who don't have a medical background. In the preface, the author says that he will cover common diseases but omit diseases affecting less than 1 in 20,000 of the population.

Judged against the criteria that the author has set himself, the book is not successful. Although it covers a lot of topics, from childhood diseases to senile dementia, it's written from the philosophical viewpoint of conventional medicine (here are the inevitable symptoms of Disease X and here's how we go about suppressing those symptoms). This makes it depressing and unlikely to appeal to those with an alternative outlook. Some of the medical jargon used is not explained. Dental health is not mentioned at all, despite the fact that dental problems must be one of the most common types of health problems in the UK.

In addition, this book hasn't been properly edited. I'm not just nit-picking here. The book is littered with typos, including some that interfere with the meaning, e.g. "casual" instead of "causal". Furthermore, the punctuation is so bad that I had to re-read some sentences to figure out which bits of the sentence belong together.

The aims are laudable, but there has to be a better book on this subject.

An excellent book that I have returned to many times
The book is written from the current, scientific understanding of how diseases occur in the body. It does not hide behind woolly explanations of chakras and energy forces simply because it is aimed at complementary practitioners - that would do us all a disservice and only give the medical profession extra ammunition against complementary therapies. Diseases aren't pretty and they aren't nice, but any serious therapist should have some knowledge of the conditions they may expect to see through their work. Medical or anatomical terms have to be employed for clarity - this book doesn't patronise you and assumes (fairly, in my opinion, given the nature of a complementary therapist's line of work) that you have some grounding in anatomy and physiology.

Dentistry is not covered, possibly because UK law precludes unqualified persons (in other words those without a dentistry degree) from performing dentisty. It would seem silly to add volume to a book if it is to be of no use to the readership.

Complementary rather than alternative
What I like about this book is that it is not extreme. It does not damn the alternative/complementary approach to medicine and it doesn't refuse to acknowledge medical science. The author, a GP from 1970-81 has taught at various schools of complementary medicine and the book evolved from discussions with homoeopaths, osteopaths, herbalists, acupuncturists and others.

Despite what it says in the foreword it is not really holistic and it does lean towards a traditional view that emotions, mind and body are treated as separate. Specialists are to be consulted whose role is to examine, diagnose and treat the parts, but as another reviewer says that's what's needed. The way in which complementary medicine aids conventional medicine will depend on the therapist. It provides guidance by acknowledging the great insights of science with its store of observation and accumulated evidence from centuries of recording and correlating data. As such Dr Ball's book is a good reference source for the main symptoms of common diseases explained without jargon.

It describes likely effects and disease progression in a concise manner, illustrated with simple diagrams and charts. It is easy to look up conditions with bold paragraph headings within each chapter and there is also a glossary of medical and homeopathic terms.