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Herbalism Is a wonderful alternative medicine that can treat both symptoms and the underlying causes of disease. For hundreds of years, the Infusions and decoctions of roots, leaves, barks, and flowers of common plants have helped the body to heal itself.

Reflecting on the connection between the rise in chronic immune disorders and toxic environmental and lifestyle patterns, herbalist and acupuncturist Jason Elias and collaborator Katherine Ketcham looked to the 5,000-year-old The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine to seek clues for restoring the balance of body and mind. In Chinese Medicine for Maximum Immunity, Elias and Ketcham show how to use the preventive strategies and gentle, supportive remedies of traditional Chinese medicine to heal contemporary chronic illnesses and bolster immunity. The book teaches readers how to identify which element--Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water--most directly influences them and how to correct imbalances that can lead to particular physical, emotional, and spiritual disorders with step-by-step instruction for using stress-reduction techniques, diet and exercise, herbs, and acupressure.

In a world where power is held by a hidden few, investigative journalists Janet Miller and Robert Dunn uncover a vast conspiracy that threatens the very fabric of society. At the heart of this shadowy web is the Virtuous Obscura, an elite organization pulling the strings behind global events—from corrupt political deals to orchestrated financial collapses, drug trafficking, and human exploitation. As Janet and Robert dig deeper into the dark underbelly of the world's most powerful institutions, they realize the scale of the Virtuous Obscura's influence is far greater than they imagined. Each revelation brings them closer to the truth, but also into the crosshairs of those willing to kill to protect it. Their lives become a dangerous game of cat and mouse, where one wrong move could mean the end. With every new lead, they expose more of the silent forces controlling global systems, but the stakes rise as they uncover the organization's most terrifying secret: a plan that could alter the course of humanity forever. Racing against time and their own fears, Janet and Robert must decide how far they're willing to go to bring the truth to light—and whether they can survive long enough to do so. The Silent Strings is a heart-pounding, high-stakes thriller that delves into the world of conspiracy, corruption, and the fight for truth. As the tension mounts, so does the danger, and readers are pulled into a relentless, edge-of-your-seat journey where nothing is as it seems, and no one can be trusted.

A shotgun misfires inside the American Fur Company store in Northern Michigan, and Alexis St. Martin's death appears imminent. It's 1822, and, as the leaders of Mackinac Island examine St. Martin's shot-riddled torso, they decide not to incur a single expense on behalf of the indentured fur trapper. They even go so far as to dismiss the attention of U.S. Army Assistant Surgeon William Beaumont, the frontier fort's only doctor. Beaumont ignores the orders and saves the young man's life. What neither the doctor nor his patient understands—yet—is that even as Beaumont's care of St. Martin continues for decades, the motives and merits of his attention are far from clear. In fact, for what he does to his patient, Beaumont will eventually stand trial and be judged. Rooted deeply in historic fact, Open Wound artfully fictionalizes the complex, lifelong relationship between Beaumont and his illiterate French Canadian patient. The young trapper's injury never completely heals, leaving a hole into his stomach that the curious doctor uses as a window to understand the mysteries of digestion. Eager to rise up from his humble origins and self-conscious that his medical training occurred as an apprentice to a rural physician rather than at an elite university, Beaumont seizes the opportunity to experiment upon his patient's stomach in order to write a book that he hopes will establish his legitimacy and secure his prosperity. As Jason Karlawish portrays him, Beaumont, always growing hungrier for more wealth and more prestige, personifies the best and worst aspects of American ambition and power.

Zen and the Unspeakable God reevaluates how we study mystical experience. Forsaking the prescriptive epistemological box that has constrained the conversation for decades, ensuring that methodology has overshadowed subject matter, Jason Blum proposes a new interpretive approach—one that begins with a mystic’s own beliefs about the nature of mystical experience. Blum brings this approach to bear on the experiential accounts of three mystical exemplars: Meister Eckhart, Ibn al-ʿArabi, and Hui-neng. Through close readings of their texts, he uncovers the mystics’ own fundamental assumptions about transcendence and harnesses these as interpretive guides to their experiences. The predominant theory-first path to interpretation has led to the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of individual mystical experiences and fostered specious conclusions about cross-cultural comparability among them. Blum’s hermeneutic invites the scholarly community to begin thinking about mystical experience in a new way—through the mystics’ eyes. Zen and the Unspeakable God offers a sampling of the provocative results of this technique and an explanation of its implications for theories of consciousness and our contemporary understanding of the nature of mystical experience.

Why do people smoke? Taking a unique approach to this question, Jason Hughes moves beyond the usual focus on biological addiction that dominates news coverage and public health studies and invites us to reconsider how social and personal understandings of smoking crucially affect the way people experience it. Learning to Smoke examines the diverse sociological and cultural processes that have compelled people to smoke since the practice was first introduced to the West during the sixteenth century. Hughes traces the transformations of tobacco and its use over time, from its role as a hallucinogen in Native American shamanistic ritual to its use as a prophylactic against the plague and a cure for cancer by early Europeans, and finally to the current view of smoking as a global pandemic. He then analyzes tobacco from the perspective of the individual user, exploring how its consumption relates to issues of identity and life changes. Comparing sociocultural and personal experiences, Hughes ultimately asks what the patterns of tobacco use mean for the clinical treatment of smokers and for public policy on smoking. Pointing the way, then, to a more learned and sophisticated understanding of tobacco use, this study will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of smoking and the sociology of addiction.