The name of this book comes from the fact that the author's personal totem is the coyote. Coyote is basically the class clown and practical joker of the animal totem world. When he is associated with medicine, he teaches people that laughter really is the best medicine and that it does possess great healing power. Naturally, a doctor such as Mehl-Madrona, who has Coyote as a personal totem, would be drawn to an alternative or unorthodox medical practice.

The author had a practice and was in his office in New York City on 9-11. He counseled many of the survivors and emergency personnel who were at the scene. Repeatedly, he heard stories of incidents that can only be explained as miracles. He shows us how the attack on the World Trade Center parallels a life-threatening illness in the body.

Mehl-Madrona decided to give up his practice, relocate to Arizona, take up writing and research medical miracles. He hoped to instill a belief in miracles and divine intervention in medical treatments and recoveries into the American public -- to discover exactly what factors did produce a medical miracle.

This book shows the steps in self-healing through faith and producing a medical miracle within oneself. Here is the process in brief: achieve a state of peace within yourself, likely the most difficult step of the process. Next, identify and get acquainted with your inner healer.

Once you find your inner healer, you are ready to begin your healing journey through the Medicine Wheel, which starts in the East. East is associated with the spirit, religion, faith and prayer. We move to the South, which is the direction of emotions and the relationships that create or affect our emotions. The West deals with healing the body through touch and movement. North completes the journey through the directions with the role of the community in healing and how the way an individuals' community views medicine will affect how the individual views it. A section follows on the importance of ceremonies and rituals in the healing process.

Even if you have no interest in faith healing, this book is definitely worth the purchase price for the stories it contains. The author bases his healing practices upon using stories to guide his patients to their own inner cure. These stories are fantastic and teach many lessons that we can use in our everyday lives.

This is the simplest and easiest to understand explanation for faith healing that I have ever found. He reduces an extremely complex issue to the point that almost anyone can readily grasp the concept.

I was impressed by his analysis of the greatest problem with creating a "norm" in any area: to get the norm, you discard the individuals at the two extremes as being too "deviant" to be considered. Mehl-Madrona feels that the only way to arrive at an accurate norm is to consider these most deviant cases with equal weight as the ones in the middle range. He also feels that the deviants are the very ones that possess the answers for how to adjust the norm, the factors that make them different may be the factors that can create change within society. This makes perfect sense.

Coyote Healing belongs in every home. There is not a person who could not benefit from absorbing this book and putting the author's teachings into practice.

- Rambles
written by Alicia Karen Elkins
published 3 April 2004