Yes. Interestingly enough, I now live again in the town where I grew up, which is about ten miles from Salem, Massachusetts. I am meeting in a few weeks with a woman who is an herbal practitioner from this area, who is something like a tenth generation New Englander, whose family arrived right after the Mayflower. What she’s doing would be outside anything we call integrative medicine. And despite the whole integrative medicine movement in the academic medical centers, there still remain people that are completely outside of that, from their own traditions.

So the healing arts move on through various pathways, despite what may or may not be happening in official channels through licensed professions, through academic health centers and so on.

Absolutely. It’s been part of every community, it continues to be part of every community, and it moves on regardless of all the official activities.

What else can you tell us about the new edition of the textbook?

I’m really excited about the new edition. Because I have been working for myself these past few years, I can take a different approach. During the previous three editions, I had full-time jobs, I worked hard, and we squeezed it in where we could.

I know the feeling.

For the fourth edition, I really could step back and think deeply again, for the first time in 15 years. And I think it allowed me to take that next step, of really beginning to understand how these healing practices work. You know, we always talk about how we don’t want to be hung up on the mechanism of action, because that is always bounded by the paradigm. True observations are true whether or not they fit within the biomedical paradigm. And we have to account for true observations and not just ignore them because they don’t fit with our explanation.

In this fourth edition, for the first time, I really moved to the point of beginning to explain how these things work outside of the biomedical paradigm. In the previous editions, we said, essentially, “Here is the evidence that these things work, here is how you make them work, and here is how you experience them.” This new edition really says, “This is how it works and why it works, based on an expanding understanding of biology.” So there’s a new chapter on energy healing, for example. I’ve always struggled with the energy healing chapter, and we’ve changed it for every previous edition. But this time I got Wayne Jonas to really work on it [Wayne Jonas, MD, is a former Army medical physician, who was Director of the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine and now serves as President and CEO of the Samueli Institute], together with John Ives. Their chapter gives you the explanations.

I’ve also got a new chapter, a really deep chapter, on psychoneuroimmunology, that I wrote with Hakima Amri, one of the people at Georgetown who are leaders in this area. [Micozzi was named Adjunct Full Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown in 2007 and teaches there regularly]. I’ve got another chapter on ecology, by a brilliant guy named Kevin Spellman (of the Tai Sophia Institute in Maryland), about the ecology of plants and how this forms the underpinning of the full science of human biology and healing.

Plus, there’s a new chapter on biophysical devices. In the past, we had a superficial catalog of biophysical devices. This time, we went into the mechanisms of how electromagnetic devices work, what they actually do at the cell level, and why you get the responses that people see. So there’s case after case where we’re able to begin to explain how they actually work, using this expanded model of human biology and healing. We have the perspective of evolutionary biology and we pulled in more sciences that normally aren’t talked about in terms of biomedicine, which usually talks about molecular biology and then stops there. We bring in all the rest of it.