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Dr Khalsa's Prescription For Pain

Dr Dharma Singh Khalsa and journalist Cameron Stauth, authors of the best-seller Brain Longevity (1997), want us to learn how to experience pain without suffering.

Written in the first-person voice of Dr Khalsa, who teaches and works in Arizona, the book discusses methods for gaining control of rather than giving in to pain.

Like Brain Longevity, which is now available in paperback, their new book The Pain Cure, is also published by Warner Books.

"Pain is in the brain," Dr Khalsa notes. "That doesn't mean it's in your mind. We can close the gates on pain by following The Pain Cure's four strategies."

Dr Khalsa's four levels of handling chronic pain involve nutritional therapy, physical therapy, medications, and mental and spiritual control.

Since acute pain is a symptom and chronic pain a disease, the patient with acute pain should promptly consult a doctor so that therapy begins before the problem becomes ingrained.

Brain Longevity shows us how we can work to improve memory and diminish the effects of age-associated memory loss, keeping our minds youthful, creative, and dynamic.

Brain Longevity offers a four-step plan based on both Eastern and Western medical traditions, including the latest research on brain chemistry.

It reveals how the right diet, exercise, meditation, and supplements can revitalize and regenerate your mind and memory.

Most of all, it is the only program to use Dr Khalsa's own findings on cortisol, an adrenal hormone produced both in reaction to stress and as part of the ageing process, a substance proven to be toxic to human brain cells.

In Brain Longevity one learns how cortisol accelerates the ageing of the mind -- and how to reverse this condition

Dr Khalsa underlines the importance of serotonin, L-tryptophan, acupuncture, exercise, homeopathic remedies, cognitive therapy, and stress reduction.

He inveighs against doctors who are afraid to give a patient a sufficient amount of a painkiller because they fear professional investigation, making the patient addicted, or unwittingly causing death. Regarding his patients as thinking and feeling individuals, Khalsa seeks to help them humanely and, perhaps more important, to show them how to improve their conditions by themselves.

Two years ago, Warner Brothers issued 100,000 copies of Brain Longevity -- a very impressive figure for a book by a then little known physician. The book became a big hit particularly with those seeking to restore faded powers.

Along with his friend Dr Andrew Weil's Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, anesthesiologist-gerontologist Khalsa's book (written with journalist Stauth) told us how to tone up a sagging mind and stave off that curse of long life, Alzheimer's disease.

Like fellow physician Weil, Dr Khalsa proffers a program -- brain-longevity therapy. He targets a particular cause of the deterioration that his scheme addresses. Too much of the hormone cortisol, produced by the body in response to stress and linked to brain damage, causes memory loss and lassitude in particular, he argues.

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