In this accessible and groundbreaking book -- filled with the moving stories of real people -- medical doctor and bestselling author ofScattered Minds, Gabor Maté, shows that emotion and psychological stress play a powerful role in the onset of chronic illness.Western medicine achieves spectacular triumphs when dealing with acute conditions such as fractured bones or life-threatening infections. It is less successful against ailments not susceptible to the quick ministrations of scalpel, antibiotic or miracle drug. Trained to consider mind and body separately, physicians are often helpless in arresting the advance of most of the chronic diseases, such as breast cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, and even Alzheimer's disease.Gabor Maté has found that in all of these chronic conditions, there is a common thread: people afflicted by these diseases have led lives of excessive stress, often invisible to...