Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy

Love and survival. What do they have to do with each other?
This book is based on a simple but powerful idea: Our survival depends on the healing power of love, intimacy and relationships. As individuals. As communities. As a country. As a culture. Perhaps even as a species.
For the past 20 years, Dean Ornish, M.D., has directed clinical research, demonstrating -- for the first time -- that comprehensive lifestyle changes may begin to reverse severe coronary heart disease without drugs or surgery. Now, this "impossible" idea has become mainstream.
Although most people tend to think of Dr. Ornish's program as being primarily about diet, he has found that perhaps the most powerful and meaningful intervention is love and intimacy and the emotional and spiritual transformation that often results. Yet those factors are largely ignored by the medical profession, which tends to focus primarily on the physical and mechanistic: drugs and surgery, genes and germs, microbes and molecules.