The Healing Power of Sound: Recovery from Life-Threatening Illness Using Sound, Voice, and Music

by Mitchell L Gaynor

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Boston, MA: Shambhala 1999   232 pp   $18.95. 

Imagine that you have just put on a CD and are playing a beautiful song. You are settling down with a lovely cup of tea and stare out the window.  As you listen, you allow the music to carry you to another realm, another dimension, and perhaps even another place in time.  In those moments you are unaware of any pain or discomfort in your body. You feel uplifted and free.  In that brief time, you have unknowingly crafted a simple type of healing on your body through the use of rhythm and sound. A growing collection of evidence shows that sound intervention in combination with meditation induces profound states of relaxation, with noticeable mental and physiologic dimensions.  (p.161)    

Mitchell Gaynor is a medical doctor, director of Oncology and Integrative Medicine at the renowned Strang Cancer Prevention Center in New York.  He attended the University of Texas-Southwestern Medical School and interned at a New York Hospital, affiliated with Cornell University Medical School.  He spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology at Rockefeller University and completed his training with an appointment at New York Hospital as the chief medical resident.  According to him, he had the best possible education available in Western medicine. However, he identified a missing link in his training: learning how to empathize with patients.  As a fledgling doctor he was taught to base his training on information and how many papers he could cite, quoting the latest statistics.  Feelings and emotions did not enter into the equation or the curriculum. (p 5)  Dr. Gaynor is now a medical doctor who has learned to listen to his intuition when working with a patient.  He suggests that what happens to a person on the emotional and spiritual level affects the person’s physiology, and that the use of sound is one of the most powerful healing modalities that could ever be embraced by current practitioners.  (p. 109)

The Healing Power of Sound is a remarkable book, delineating and clarifying how sound contributes to emotional wellness and relaxation.  There are three parts to this book: 1. how the essence of sound heals; 2. how to tune the mind, body and soul; and 3. how to create a new personal paradigm for healing. Twelve exercises explain  how to create pure vocal sounds to resolve tension and release emotions to begin the healing process. Gaynor explains that sound can change a person’s physiology by reducing anxiety, reducing cardiac complications, lowering blood pressure and boosting the body’s natural opiates, known as endorphins — the brain’s natural painkiller.  (p. 8) Dr. Gaynor’s personal work with clients is described, using various techniques of chanting, healing with the tones of crystal and Tibetan bowls, music, meditation and guided imagery. 

It is Gaynor's belief that all physical illness is a manifestation of a mind-body imbalance that wrecks havoc on the physiologic system and leads to health problems unless the patterns of negative emotions are changed.  These changes are achieved by the integration of music, vocalization, breathing and meditation that all individuals can use to improve their health and quality of life. 

This book might be a wonderful gift to friends interested in alternative healing modalities.  It is wonderfully written and a ‘must have’ book for every library.  

Reviewed by Monte Mohr, Doctoral Student
Holos University Graduate Seminary
http://www.holosuniversity.org/

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