Donna receives many sincere and thoughtful questions about Energy Medicine and health. These questions and their answers often have broad relevance for educating people about Energy Medicine, and we are reprinting some of them here. Identifying information has been omitted to protect privacy; extraneous conversation has been omitted to keep the discussion on target for instructional purposes.

A few obvious disclaimers are in order. Virtually every response began "Without being able to personally assess your energies, I can only make some general suggestions." While this statement has often been edited out of the responses to avoid becoming repetitious, it always applies. Letters obviously do not give any health practitioner a basis for making a firm assessment or formulating a treatment.

The spirit of this page is educational rather than prescriptive. It shows how to think about applying Energy Medicine in a broad range of situations. It is also important to understand that "diagnosis" and "treatment" within Energy Medicine have different meanings than they have within traditional medicine. The focus is not on symptoms or illness; the focus is on keeping the body's energy system strong, vital, harmonious, healthy. Assessment is of the energy system, not of the illness. Symptoms provide clues about where the energy system needs attention. Treatment is not the treatment of symptoms or illness, it is the treatment of the energy system. These distinctions are vital not only because it is legal to educate people to keep their body's energies healthy and not legal for unlicensed people to diagnosis and treat illness. They are vital because they show you a fundamentally different way of thinking about health and illness, built on a paradigm that directs your attention to the energetic foundation of staying healthy.

The techniques suggested here may be used along with traditional medical treatments and will generally complement them. It is important that your health care professional know what other interventions you are using. Finally, because the questions were for the most part asked by people who had read Donna's book or been to a class, many of the dialogues assume that you have access to and familiarity with the book Energy Medicine. We hope you will find this to be a valuable and vital learning tool.

These dialogues were edited by David Feinstein with the assistance of Patricia Butler, Nancy Heyerman, Sara Allen, and Vicki Matthews.