After Hay appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Donahue in the same week in March 1988, the book appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list, and by 2008, over 35 million copies worldwide had been sold in over 30 languages, becoming one of the best-selling non-fiction book of all time.

While modern medicine concerns itself with eliminating symptoms of disease in the body, using tools such as chemotherapy and other pharmaceutical drugs and various surgical techniques, Hay's approach is to identify and work to resolve what she perceives as the mental root causes of disease.

[1][2][3] In 2007, the book was adapted into a documentary film of the same name, with a screenplay written by Gay Hendricks and directed by Michael A.

A lot of suppressed anger is involved..." Hay has also been criticized for 'blaming the victim' by suggesting that people with AIDS are causing their own illness due to poor mental attitude, and for claiming for decades that positive attitude can defeat AIDS, despite not being able to demonstrate any examples of this happening.

[7][better source needed] The book also claims that birth defects are due to karma and that children choose their parents.