Book: Natural Recovery

How to understand your illness, conquer it and recover perfect health

Several years ago, Elyane Brightlight contacted Legionnaire"s Disease. As a natural therapist, she had always treated patients with illness, but she had related to them as the Queen of Health. Her own experience of illness meant that suddenly she had a new understanding of what it was like – the pain, the fear that she would never feel well again and the depression that often accompanies ill–health were all experienced by her in a new way.

It is from this experience that she has written Natural Recovery. At some time in our lives we will all know someone who is ill, or develop an illness ourselves. Natural Recovery is about regaining perfect health and providing strategies to help us cure ourselves from illness. Illness may take many forms, from the most serious, to the feeling that we are walking around with a general sense that all is not well with our bodies. Elyane T. Brightlight examines all issues associated with illness by looking at specific conditions and developing a series of "good health principles". Her aim is for us no matter what our condition to recover perfect health.

What Reader's and Patients Think of NATURAL RECOVERY

"This is a glorious book. Elyane Brightlight, its author, is a naturopath whose natural charm, energy, and joie de vivre have been enchanting her wide circle of friends and patients for years. And it is one of the exceptionally rare do-it-yourself books on health that I would unhesitatingly recommend to anyone in search of sound advice.

Racy, funny, at times hard-hitting, it spells out key truths about the recovery of good health for those stricken by maladies as diverse as pneumonia, depression, asthma, IBS, HIV, cancer and arthritis.

From her long experience, Elyane deals with each briskly and authoritatively, spelling out, too, just which nutritional supplements or healing herbs might be lifesaving, explaining why and suggesting exact doses. But first things first, she insists: before you even start thinking vitamins and herbs, clean up your gut, and get your breathing act together.

Along the way she demolishes a number of popular myths about healthy eating. And she makes some controversial suggestions. A toxin-free life may not guarantee you immunity from illness. Asthma may be an iatrogenic (induced by doctors) disease. Candida is no big deal. If you wear high heels, expect back problems in later life.

But this is much more than a comprehensive how-to-manual for those struggling for better health. It is also the painfully honest saga of a three-year battle for survival by a naturopath who had once believed herself invincibly fit, healthy and energetic, and who, in 1994, was unexpectedly felled by a mysterious bug.

I read it in one gulp like a good thriller and I am certainly going to make it my personal health bible."

Barbara Griggs is the author of the classic herbal bestseller: Green Medicine (1981, 1997)

"Thank you so much for writing this book. I thought there was something wrong with me psychologically because I could not get better; but you made me understand that I was not going mad, instead your book is showing me how to look after myself."
Steve Roberts (reader)

"I am not very good at reading at night but I couldn't put your book down, it is entertaining as well as informative. The chapter relevant to my condition made me feel like you wrote it especially for me." (patient)

"I can't believe how much information there is in your book. Finally I am starting to understand a lot about diet. Thank you for smashing so many myths and making things clear." Georgia McDonald (reader)

"This book is really funny and even irreverent.. The subject matter could be drab but you actually make it exciting. I would not have ever thought that a description of the way the digestion works could be hilarious but in your book it is. Your approach makes the absorption of the enormous amount of factual material easily absorbable. Lots of spoons full of sugar to make the medicine go down so to speak: the book teaches by entertaining.
Thanks, you're the PJ O'Rourke of naturopaths!" Doug Milner (reader)

Natural Recovery - Table of Contents