LISTEN TO YOUR BODY, subtitled “Holistic Choices for Managing Chronic Pain,” offers readers just that: a variety of methods by which one can live with pain incurred through illness or injury. Author Wendi M. Lindenmuth writes from experience, having contracted Lyme disease in 2015. Multiple infections followed, including meningitis, and subsequent complications left her experiencing troubles with long-term memory. “When I became ill, I began to despise the body I lived in and longed for a new one,” Lindenmuth writes. It is a terrible thing to feel your own essence has betrayed you.
The remedy is to seek reconciliation with one’s condition, and to manage pain in as effective a way as possible while recognizing one’s changed circumstances. Lindenmuth is all too aware of the frustration and anger that comes with contracting a life-changing illness; prior to her disease’s onset, Lindenmuth had been an active marathon runner and cyclist, and healthy. “I did NOT sign up for this life,” she states at one point. “I was mad, sad, and very frightened.” A variety of techniques and approaches helped her, including maintaining hope, finding solace in the belief that one’s condition will improve, and focusing on the possible while maintaining dreams and goals.
Each chapter ends with an activity designed to assist the reader in organizing their thoughts regarding their condition. Lindenmuth’s inclusion of basic citations for scientific studies that show the efficacy of certain mindsets is laudable, though the inclusion of the famous study by Harris et al (1999) that claimed a link between the recovery times of cardiac patients and intercessory prayer smacks of cherry-picking. More recent meta-studies on the effectiveness of prayer as a healing technique are, at best, inconclusive. In the same way, dalliances with “vibrational frequencies” towards the end of the book are best dispensed with, except perhaps for their placebo value. Lindenmuth does at least allow for the subjective nature of such chapters, pointing out that “[her] intent is only to offer information of an anecdotal and general nature that may be part of your quest for emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual well-being.”
In general, there is little here to find fault with. If LISTEN TO YOUR BODY hardly reinvents the wheel in the genre of self-help books, it still may indeed provide comfort and ideas to those who find their lives upended by the sudden onset of painful medical conditions.
Though the approach is unoriginal, LISTEN TO YOUR BODY: Holistic Choices for Managing Chronic Pain by Wendi M. Lindenmuth succeeds in giving readers grappling with difficult diagnoses ways of approaching their conditions that might assist in the alleviation of pain.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader