Seven Minutes to Natural Pain Release - Softcover

Daniel J. Benor, MD, has taught his spectrum of healing methods for twenty-five years. He is the author of Healing Research and many articles on holistic, spiritual healing. He is the editor and publisher of the peer reviewed International Journal of Healing and Caring. He appears internationally on radio and television and is a founding diplomat of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine.

Dan Benor is one of the most creative, inspired healers in our culture. In his latest achievement, he has combined two recognized approaches to pain management and related problems. The result is WHEE, a non-drug, non-surgical technique that is likely to be a major breakthrough. This discovery is a great gift to the millions of pain sufferers who are still seeking relief. If pain is a part of your life, you can't afford NOT to read this book. --Larry Dossey, MD, Author of The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things

Dr. Daniel Benor's book will empower you by giving you the tools with which you can learn from your pain, restore your health and heal your life. --Bernie Siegel, MD, Author of Help Me To Heal and Love, Medicine & Miracles

This book review starts with the disclosure that I am not an unbiased reviewer, having known Daniel Benor, MD, personally and professionally for many years. But that s not why this review is so positive. Dr. Benor has written a very important book. I have long admired his scholarly work in assembling an encyclopedic, 4-volume collection of research on energy healing, psychic phenomena, and other such boundary-stretching topics. But I did not fully realize until reviewing this book that, in addition to being a noted researcher, editor, and teacher, he is also a gifted clinician. Seven Minutes to Natural Pain Release is an important synthesis of his clinical work and his research endeavors, focusing on the notoriously challenging syndrome of chronic pain.

Mind-body medicine practitioners have long known that chronic pain is the archetypal disease for illustrating the connection between mind and body. Chronic pain clinics have been the breeding grounds for many of the most important breakthroughs in the field of mind-body medicine and have featured the use of multidisciplinary teams, with the focus on self-management and empowerment rather than clinician dominance. They also led to early acceptance of now-established techniques like meditation, hypnosis, and biofeedback. However, an important ingredient has been missing from many of these approached to chronic pain, and Dr. Benor s book helps provide the key explaining the emerging field of energy psychology (EP).

In traditional Chinese medicine, life energy (or qi) is understood as the link between mind and body. In Dr. Benor s expanded model of energy psychology, this vital force becomes the bridge between thoughts, emotions, body, and spirit. He s developed a simple technique that works on all these levels, and this book is a primer for its use. His technique is called WHEE, the acronym used to describe the Wholistic Hybrid of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). The latter 2 are the 2 best known energy psychology techniques. WHEE is a distillation of Dr Benor s 40+ years of experience in holistic medicine. His book provides an easy-to-understand outline of what too often is presented as an esoteric topic, and the book is further sharpened by his focus on pain management as the single clinical issue of concern.

Dr. Benor offers several dozen vivid clinical vignettes to illustrate key points, and, as the story unfolds, the picture he paints becomes all the more compelling. Furthermore, his willingness to describe how he has used these techniques to facilitate his own inner growth is inspiring and clearly illustrates the importance of putting into practice the somewhat clichéd notion of healing the healer. Best of all, the techniques are presented in such a way that the reader is drawn into self-experimentation, the most powerful way to experience the unusual impact of deceptively simple energy therapies like WHEE.

The array of topics covered in this book is large, ranging from more traditional (and popular) psychological approaches like inner-child work and transactional analysis to the science of psychoneuroimmunology and the research basis of EP. The section on how to implement WHEE is particularly thorough and highlights the pitfalls most likely to be encountered by the beginning practitioner. Dr Benor utilizes the notion of pain as feedback from the unconscious mind to show how we can learn from pain and trigger our personal growth.

I ll finish this review with 2 final comments: first, I now teach WHEE to all my patients in the pain management program where I work; second, I wish that I had written this book! --Eric Leskowitz, MD, Advances, Fall 2008, Vol. 23, No. 3, p. 26-27.