Eric B. Robins, MD, is a board-certified urologist and surgeon in private practice and affiliated with a major hospital in Los Angeles. He received his MD degree from Baylor College of Medicine in 1989 and his BA in Biology from the University of Texas at Austin. Robins served his internship at Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center in Los Angeles from 1989-1990. He served his residencies at that same facility - in general surgery, from 1990-1991, and in urology, from 1991-1995.

Dr. Robins has extensive training in alternative healing therapies. He is a certified clinical hypnotherapist, a neurolinguistic programming practitioner, a timeline therapy practitioner and a certified PRANIC HEALING instructor.

Dr. Robins is also a frequent speaker on alternative healing and has given presentations to such groups as the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Staff Meeting, the Kaiser Permanente Congestive Heart Failure Patients Group, the Kaiser Permanente Cultural Diversity Organization and the YMCA Health Lecture Series.

Dr. Robins had an abiding interest in the mind-body connection long before he decided to become a physician, and that interest profoundly shaped his attitudes toward traditional medicine and healing. His study of yoga, meditation and hypnosis in high school and college led him to think critically about the curriculum he encountered in medical school - in particular, the lack of specificity in the teachings on the body's healing process. Where, he wondered, was the force behind the biochemical process of cell division and growth? What exactly compels this process? What intelligence, if any, guides it? Can it be controlled at all? These questions lingered with him through his internship and into his practice as a urologist and surgeon in Los Angeles.

As Dr. Robins began his medical career, he began to see, after a brief time in practice, a startling number of people who had urological symptoms - bladder pain and urinary urgency and frequency, for instance - that had no perceptible cause. Dr. Robins would run tests, but the tests would show no anatomic or pathological reason for the symptom, and yet the patient clearly had the problem he or she described. Initially, he fell back on his medical school training, concluding that most of these problems were "in his patients heads," and he would prescribe a drug or procedure to try to alleviate the symptom. However, that approach provided only sporadic positive results.

Growing frustrated with the remedies of traditional allopathic (Western) medicine, Dr. Robins sought formal certification in hypnosis and later, neurolinguistic programming, both of which increased his rate of cures. He then began to integrate into his practice more advanced mind-body technologies, such as timeline therapy, which uses sophisticated linguistic cues to take a patient back in his or her personal history to release emotional trauma, and the "emotional freedom technique," in which the practitioner taps acupuncture points to remove both physical and emotional trauma. Dr. Robins found the key that made all of these practices more dependable was adding the energy healing system known as PRANIC HEALING. With PRANIC HEALING, Dr. Robins's success rate increased dramatically. Shortly thereafter, his thinking on healing, the nature of illness and the physician-patient relationship began to evolve.

Three ideas informed his new thinking:

1) The patient needs to be ãat causeä for his or her illness and health - that is, regardless of whether the treatment is traditional or alternative, the patient must first take responsibility for the ailment and the cure.

2) The body tends to heal itself through a natural healing consciousness and an energy that is more tangible and substantial than what traditional medicine understands to be the body's energy-producing biochemical process. This healing system can be prompted, and the healing energy cultivated, increased and directed using the PRANIC HEALING techniques Dr. Robins learned in classes with Master Stephen Co.

3) Our physical health is profoundly tied to our emotions, beliefs and attitudes.

Putting his ideas into practice, Dr. Robins created an effective blend of patient education, energy healing and traditional diagnostic measures and treatments that soon drew the attention of physicians, nurses and even administrators in the hospital where he practiced. He began teaching some of the staff his model on an informal basis. He developed and taught to other physicians a technique called "pranic anesthesia," which significantly reduces discomfort for patients who have to undergo painful procedures such as cytoscopy, in which a lighted tube is fed into the urethra to look into the bladder.

Dr. Robins has found PRANIC HEALING to be so helpful that he wants to expose as many people to it as possible. This book is the vehicle he hopes will help him accomplish this goal.

Dr. Robins resides in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, with his wife of seven years, Linda, and their five-year-old son, Jonah.

John Merryman received his BA in English from Kent State University and pursued graduate training in Creative Writing at Ohio State University. He has been a longtime freelance journalist and contributor to numerous publications and newspapers, including Los Angeles Magazine, California Magazine, Playboy, Cleveland Magazine, Orange Coast Magazine and the Copley papers, among others.

He has also been a public affairs/public relations executive in several industries, including, for the last 15 years, health care.

Merryman has had a longtime interest in meditation and the power of the mind, stemming from a lifetime involvement in the martial arts and alternative health.

He lives in Redondo Beach, California, with his wife, Betsy, a vice president with Fischer & Partners, a health care public relations firm, and their son, David.