Neural Therapy & Self Organization. From Pain Genesis to Pain Relief. Foundations and Practice.

The book that you are about to read builds upon Speransky and Huneke discoveries, but it also gathers in modern ideas that open our eyes to new possibilities not only in Neural Therapy, but also in general medicine. This book is important for a number of reasons. Dr. Koval is not the first to recognize the importance of Speransky's work in the practice of Neural Therapy. However he has brought this recognition one step further by articulating clearly one of Speransky's most important discoveries, i.e. that the body "makes" a disease. In fact Dr. Koval uses the term "to make a disease" frequently to drive home the idea that disease is not the absence of health, but rather a self-organizing process that "emerges" from the body according to the laws of dynamic systems. This has enormous implications for how we understand illness.Another achievement of this book is its introduction of modern concepts of complex systems into the world of medicine. This is long overdue, not just for Neural Therapy, but also for Classical Medicine which seems to be languishing in outmoded understandings of the nature of illness. Dr Koval challenge current theories of chronic pain on both theoretical and practical grounds - theoretical because they say so little about ultimate causes - practical because current theories offer few solutions other than a lifetime of analgesic medication. In fact he prefers the term persistent pain to chronic pain, because of the word chronic's connotation of hopeless unchangeability. I expect physicians practicing Neural Therapy will applaud this change in terminology; long-standing pain needs only persist until the neural therapist finds and treats the ultimate cause(s). The first half of the book (on complex systems) is a fascinating read for any educated layperson. The second half is for the clinician. It is a must-read for any practitioner of Neural Therapy, whether novice or experienced.