Reviews
OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
Relax More, July 2007
Go to your happy place. According to the Interheart global study, which surveyed 30,000 subjects across 52 countries, stress is responsible for a fifth of heart attacks worldwide. Duke University researchers found that among patients with a history of heart problems, stress management reduces cardiac events by 74 percent. Therapy, yoga, tai chi, and meditation are all effective techniques. Meditation especially “reduces excessive physiological responses to stressors,” notes Dr. Robert H. Schneider, co-author of Total Heart Health (Basic health Publications, 2006).
TOWNSEND LETTER
Heart Disease — Defeating a Modern Plague with Ancient Wisdom, July 2007
Reviewer: Martin Zucker
A heart book based on ancient Ayurveda and modern Quantum physics? Sounds like a stretch, but not so. Cardiologist Schneider, assisted by medical researcher Fields, bridges the healing eons in a totally comprehensive, inviting, and refreshing way. You will like this book even if you know nothing about Ayurveda, the thousands of years’ old healing tradition from India, and regard Quantum physics as something you couldn’t possibly understand. That’s because this self-help text is super practical, easy-to-understand, and totally relevant for both clinicians and health-minded folks at large. (read more)
ENLIGHTENMENT TODAY
Giving Heart a Chance, November 2006
Reviewer: Linda Egenes (IA)
With today’s epidemic of heart disease—and its risk factors of high blood pressure, stress, elevated cholesterol, obesity, and diabetes—it’s hard to wrap your mind around a concept such as total heart health. Yet in their book Total Heart Health: How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease with the Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health (Basic Health Publications, 2006), authors Robert Schneider, M.D., F.A.C.C., and Jeremy Fields, Ph.D., provide a simple, step-by-step guide for improving heart health naturally and without harmful side effects. (read whole review)
AMAZON
An Unusually Broad Approach to a Healthy Heart, July 3, 2006
Reviewer: J. Karpen (IA)
The scope of this book is remarkable. Thanks to Dean Ornish and others, many people now understand that lifestyle choices are very important in maintaining a healthy heart and can play a role in treating heart disease. Dr. Schneider goes further. His approach includes meditation, Vedic sounds, architecture, Vedic Astrology, and more.
And in his chapters about lifestyle choices, Dr. Schneider gets unusually specific. He talks about the ayurvedic concept of body types. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to diet, for example, he explains that the best diet for a person depends on his or her body type. He explains that obesity — a major risk factor for heart disease — can be caused by different kinds of imbalances in the physiology depending on body type. And therefore the treatment of obesity must match the type of imbalance in the individual. He helps readers identify their body type and gives considerable detail in regard to the types of foods they should favor or avoid according to body type.
Overall, he sees the body as a sort of fine-tuned instrument. He explains how it can get out of tune and a range of ways to fix it, to fix the imbalances that crop up and cause disease. Further, he understands that this finely tuned instrument isn’t isolated but has an intimate connection with the universe. And he even discusses techniques such as Vedic Astrology to help understand and treat imbalances in the physiology.
He undergirds each of the approaches he describes with a scientist’s analysis of how it works.
Right On The Mark, December 26, 2006
Reviewer: Martin Zucker (CA)
In this pill popping and cholesterol obsessed age of ours, here is a timely book showing how defusing stress with meditation and other time tested techniques prevent and heal heart problems. I know this approach works. Years ago, my doctor wanted to put me on medication for high blood pressure. Wary of side effects, I looked for something natural and found Transcendental Meditation. Within a month or two, my pressure had normalized, and has stayed normal for 30 years with continued regular meditation. At a recent checkup, my blood pressure read 120/60. Not bad for a kid, let alone a 69 year old.
The fact is that stress causes or aggravates a lot of the chronic health problems that our medical system has little success treating. The book rolls out an impressive volume of scientific studies to support how simple methods from an ancient tradition has significant medical relevance in the 21st century. The meditation technique is so valid, in fact, that the National Institutes of Health continues to fund ongoing research, as the authors indicate.
The power of the techniques described in this book goes way beyond heart health, to happiness, relationships, productivity, and quality of life. If more people practiced these techniques, instead of popping pills, the collective health of this country would surely rise from its present sorry state, and health care costs wouldn’t take such a massive bite out of the American economy.
A natural, holistic, prevention-oriented, and extensively validated approach, November 1, 2006
Reviewer: Craig Pearson (IA)
Heart disease kills more people in the West than all other diseases put together. Yet modern medicine has failed to identify a treatment or even the cause of heart disease. It has succeeded only in naming the risk factors.
Complementary and alternative medicine offers a variety of approaches — but how does one know which one is most effective?
This book presents an approach to both understanding and treating heart disease that is natural, holistic, prevention-oriented, free of side-effects — and supported by more scientific research validation than any other approach. The authors and their colleagues have received nearly $25 million in research funding from the National Institutes of Health over the past 15 years, and their highly encouraging research findings, conducted in collaboration with universities around the U.S., have been the subject of wave after wave of national and international news stories — thousands of articles altogether.
The approach they have been researching has been brought to light from the world’s oldest continuous tradition of knowledge, the ancient Vedic tradition of India. And their research findings have been unprecedented. The studies show that this approach:
- reduces high blood pressure — with the same effectiveness as hypertensive drugs, but without the negative side-effects and at a fraction of the cost
- reverses atherosclerosis
- reduces cholesterol and lipid peroxides
- reduces free radicals
- reverses left ventricular hypertrophy (the dangerous over-build-up of heart muscle)
- reverses the damage of heart disease
- reduces other risk factors for heart disease, including smoking, alcohol abuse, psychological stress, and socio-environmental stress.
This approach is based on an understanding of human physiology and health that is simple and sensible yet profound and comprehensive. All disease, including heart disease, arises from physiological imbalance. Imbalance in turn arises when the body becomes disconnected from its own inner intelligence. So the key to treating heart disease — and any disease — is to enliven the body’s inner intelligence. Automatically, physiological balance and health are restored.
The books offers a wealth of practical guidance to accomplish just this — including diet, exercise, daily and seasonal routines, purification procedures — all on the foundation of the most widely researched of meditation techniques, the Transcendental Meditation program, which awakens the body’s inner intelligence from within.
Here is an approach that’s simple and natural — and, as extensive scientific research documents, it works.
An “inside-out” approach to the prevention and reversal of heart disease, January 25, 2007
Reviewer: Steven Schneider (McAllen, TX)
Total Heart Health presents an “inside-out” approach to the prevention and reversal of heart disease. The authors, a leading scientific pioneer in the field of complementary and alternative medicine, Robert H. Schneider, M.D. and health writer, Jeremy Z. Fields, Ph.D., present a compelling argument for “awakening the body’s inner intelligence” to prevent and combat heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States.
Total Heart Health, according to the authors, is only possible when mind, body, and environment are all treated as one interconnected system. Part One of their book focuses on the Mind Approach — Transcendental Meditation (T.M.) — the cornerstone of the Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health, the health care system Schneider and Fields subscribe to. They present ample scientific evidence to show that T.M. reduces stress, hypertension, and results in a number of other heart-related health benefits.
If Transcendental Meditation is the “inside” approach to health because of its emphasis on meditation, then Parts II and III of Total Heart Health present the “outside” approach — focusing respectively on the body and the environment. The authors present lots of good tips on exercise and diet suitable for different body types in Part II, and in Part III discuss the advantages of living in a healthy home designed according to the principles of “Vedic Architecture.” The authors then reach for the stars in a discussion of “Vedic Astrology” and present imaginative diagrams on how different parts of the body may be correlated with the solar system.
This book then ranges from the unified field of consciousness to the very heavens themselves. It is a lovely combination of practical advice, scientifically validated research on a unique system of health care shown to reduce the risk of heart disease, and imaginatively engaging in its discussion of “cosmic counterparts.” It belongs on any book shelf because of its unique contribution to Wellness in an age riddled by disease.