Total Health: The Fourth Dimension

Eleanor Boyle is a community college psychology instructor and a
journalist in Vancouver.

This is a slim volume of observations and advice on what its author
calls essential ingredients for complete health. Suggesting that true
health goes beyond the physical and psychological to embrace the
spiritual dimension of life, the book gently argues the impossibility of
health without a reverence for the profound. Total Health lays out the
ideas of its author in 12 brief chapters that probe guilt, forgiveness,
friendship, and other important themes regarding the kind of healing
with which the author was so familiar. Before his 1988 death, Birtch was
a Christian minister, associated for more than twenty years with
Ontario’s Donwood Institute, a hospital specifically for addicts. He
writes with a real understanding of human needs and failings, and with
compassion toward the alcoholics with whom he worked.

Birtch has not attempted a definitive study of any of the topics
through which he ranges (which include substance abuse, the psychology
of human needs, and the eternal quest to fashion meaning in life).
Rather, he makes quiet observations, producing a book that is as much
inspirational as informational. His message is one of simple truths,
articulated purely from experience and acquired wisdom. Birtch emerges
from his prose as a tolerant person whose aim seemed not to convert
others to his religion, but to help them realize fuller and deeper lives
along whichever path was best for them.

The book is not sophisticated, philosophically or psychologically, but
it doesn’t try to be. There are also many books on the shelves today
that are more comprehensive than Total Health on topics of spirituality
and holistic medicine. But this book will prove valuable for individuals
who need to be reminded quickly and simply of the important things in
life.