[.ca] Womans Complete Guide To Natural Health (ISBN 1583331557)

From Amazon.com:
A Woman's Complete Guide to Natural Health aims to help women keep their bodies in balance using a variety of natural healing modalities. Authors Lynne Paige Walker--pharmacist and expert in homeopathy, Chinese medicine, and acupuncture--and medical writer Ellen Hodgson Brown discuss women's hormones and the problems with synthetic HRT, recommending plant hormone alternatives and naturopathic approaches to address the underlying causes of hormone imbalance and reduce toxic chemical and heavy metal buildup. Most of the book is a compendium of 140 women's ailments, from acne to yeast infections, describing the shortcomings of conventional treatments and recommending natural remedies: Chinese medicine, herbs, flower essences, homeopathy, and nutritional supplements. Most ailments get just 1 to 3 pages due to the number of conditions covered. Still, there's plenty of information to digest. For high blood pressure, for example, the authors present data on the side effects and problematic results of hypertension medications, then recommend herbs such as hawthorn berry complex and dandelion leaf, homeopathy, nutritional supplements such as coenzyme Q-10, and relaxation techniques Bibliographic notes are included. It would have been helpful to offer recommended resources, particularly useful Web sites. Recommended for women who wish to pursue natural remedies and need a place to start. --Joan Price

NOT a COMPLETE guide to Women's Natural Health:
This book is attractive, fairly well presented, and might be a good addition to your collection if you're already knowledgeable of Natural Health topics,but to say it's COMPLETE is inaccurate. On your road to self care knowledge, this is interesting to read but not a primary resource as the cover seems to want you to believe. The author gives you her personal twist on a number of women's health issues but focuses on relatively few products by some rather obscure brands. This leaves readers to wonder if she writes mostly about brands offered by her own herb company. An herb company appears to be promoted in the book by referral to a very cursory web page and 800 number in the introduction but not specifically identified as her own entity. Some of the homeopathic entries are intriguing, but again are generally referring to one company's offerings in a way that felt like the company was being promoted rather than more clearly addressing the homeopathic topic. If you can only choose one book on natural health, the one to have is the most recent edition of Prescriptions for Nutritional Healing because the entries are more thorough and the product recommendations offer a broader scope of what's out there on the shelves. If you want several resources in your personal library, this book might be on down the list after a couple of quality guides to homeopathy and natural healing. I have owned every edition of Prescriptions for Nutritional Healing (PNH), and it continues to be the best and most complete book on natural health that I can find anywhere. There is also a new 2002 PNH smaller guide to supplements that covers even more products and updates, but it too doesn't claim to be a complete guide - a good clue.