Cured: The Power of Our Immune System and the Mind-Body Connection

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eat fresh, eat plants, eat whole foods, and don’t put refined sugar and flours, or anything processed or artificial, into your body As two of the first punks in the provincial English town of Crawley, Lol Tolhurst and Robert Smith didn't have it easy. Outsiders from the start, theirs was a friendship based initially on proximity and a shared love of music, from the punk that was raging in nearby London to the groundbreaking experimentation of David Bowie's "Berlin Trilogy." First known as The Easy Cure, they began playing in pubs and soon developed their own unique style and approach to songwriting, resulting in timeless songs that sparked a deep sense of identification and empathy in listeners, songs like "Boys Don't Cry," "Just Like Heaven," and "Why Can't I Be You?," spearheading a new subculture dubbed "Goth" by the press. The music of The Cure was not only accessible but also deeply subversive, challenging conventional notions of pop music and gender roles while inspiring a generation of devoted fans and a revolution in style.

This is another book that I think I will return to. It is a hopeful yet clear eyed look at what people with life threatening diagnoses can do to make the most of the lives they have. The author, a Harvard trained doctor, offers four pillars of health.These are as follows: “healing your immune system, healing your nutrition, healing your stress response, and healing your identity.” The book feels incredibly personal - not because it is the story of one man, but because it's the story of one man's perspective. Lol clearly knows what his readers want to hear. The focus of the book is largely dedicated to The Cure, what went well and what went wrong. That is what his readers are interested in, and his almost twenty five years away from the band get a mere mention. Lol will not become best friend to the reader. But the reader will understand him better. Marchant explores the possibilities of psychology-based approaches to improving physical well-being in this open-minded, evidence-based account… A powerful and critically-needed conceptual bridge.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)This is popular science writing at its very best.” Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery Taylor’s “Newcastle” weight loss programme is a clinically proven method of reversing early type 2 diabetes and his approach is currently being rolled out to people with the condition by the NHS. It involves cutting your calorie intake to 700-800 calories a day. In the book, he explains how the people in his programme managed to do this – typically by consuming only slimming meal shakes and non-starchy vegetables, plus one cup of tea or coffee each day with skimmed milk – lost a life-changing amount of weight in just eight weeks. And how you can do the same, safely, at home. It is almost universal that health can be returned When I was told that an earring in my right ear was the equivalent of declaring to the world that I was gay, which I wasn't, I promptly had it pierced twice. The time for being polite was over. We were confrontational because we had to be."

Being dismissed by doctors is a bitter pill to swallow. I’ve sometimes felt like the doctors were my enemies as much as the cancer.When it comes to understanding the connection between our mental and physical health, we should be looking at the exceptions, not the rules. In Cured, Dr. Rediger digs down to the root causes of illness, showing how to create an environment that sets the stage for healing. He reveals the patterns behind healing and lays out the physical and mental principles associated with recovery: first, we need to physically heal our diet and our immune systems. Next, we need to mentally heal our stress response and our identities. If people really do want to make it happen, then in the first few years of diagnosis, it’s almost universal that their health can be returned to normal,” says Taylor, who is professor of medicine and metabolism at Newcastle University. In one study, he found that nine out of 10 people with “early” type 2 diabetes were cured after losing more than 2½st (15kg). The placebo effect is a wonderful thing, and still highly mysterious. A person who believes they have been given effective treatment for pain or disease, even though they haven’t, might get better. Placebos can work even if you know they are placebos, and for reasons no one understands the placebo effect appears to be getting stronger over time. It is silly to casually dismiss findings that a medicine performs only a little bit better than placebo: placebo is already extremely strong.

For as long as I've known Robert people have been out to get him. On stage, in the pubs, or on the street, he's always been a target. I've never seen Robert instigate a fight, yet there's something about him that provokes people."

BUT I gobbled up this book. For all the clunkiness in the delivery, the story is there (and the stories!), the perspective is there, the personality is there, and all of that is great and well worth a read, especially (obviously) for hardcore Cure fans or once-upon-a-time hardcore fans like me. Really, this covers the perfect span for me. I never thought about it before, but it was really around Lol's departure that my mania for the band began to very slowly wane (not because he left, I don't think, though maybe the breakup of that early nucleus of the band did have an effect that contributed to it). I still love them, and Lol captures a lot of the community--the philosophy if you like--of The Cure. The book gets at what they were (are?) all about as an idea--a way of looking at things. He gets at why they have brought so many people together and how they and their music are cathartic for many people. The articulation is a little fuzzy in parts, but the message absolutely comes across. I appreciate that.