If we respond to the message of pain or disease, the demand for adaptation, we can break through to a new level of wellness. - Marilyn Ferguson

The shift for which we have waited, a revolution of appropriate trust, is beginning. Instead of enemies, we are looking for allies everywhere. When an international conference, "The Future of the West," convened at the University of Southern California, the authorities agreed firmly on one point: The conference had been misnamed. The West, they said, can have no future apart from the East.

The new political awareness has little to do with parties or ideologies. Its constituents don't come in blocs. Power that is never surrendered by the individual cannot be brokered. Not by revolution or protest but by autonomy, the old slogan becomes a surprising fact: Power to the people. One by one by one. p. 240

For all its reputed conservatism, Western medicine is undergoing an amazing revitalization. Patients and professionals alike are beginning to see beyond symptoms to the context of illness: stress, society, family, diet, season, emotions. Just as the readiness of a new constituency makes a new politics, the needs of patients can change the practice of medicine.