Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers the Surprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity
Joining the ranks of modern myth busters, Dr. Sharon Moalem turns our current understanding of illness on its head and challenges us to fundamentally change the way we think about our bodies, our health, and our relationship to just about every other living thing on earth. Through a fresh and...
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Joining the ranks of modern myth busters, Dr. Sharon Moalem turns our current understanding of illness on its head and challenges us to fundamentally change the way we think about our bodies, our health, and our relationship to just about every other living thing on earth. Through a fresh and engaging examination of our evolutionary history, Dr. Moalem reveals how many of the conditions that are diseases today actually gave our ancestors a leg up in the survival sweepstakes. But Survival of the Sickest doesn't stop there. It goes on to demonstrate just how little modern medicine really understands about human health, and offers a new way of thinking that can help all of us live longer, healthier lives.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780060889661 (0060889667)
ASIN: 60889667
Publish date: March 18th 2008
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Pages no: 304
Edition language: English
Category:
Non Fiction,
History,
Science,
Biology,
Health,
Medical,
Medicine,
Evolution,
Genetics,
Illness,
Disease
Survival of the Sickest explores the connections between evolution, disease, and current human health. This book is extremely interesting and engaging, despite the cheesey puns. However, I had hoped for more - more science/medical details, more examples of the evolution-disease-health connections....
It's a light look at a variety of diseases and why it would be that they would continue to survive and perpetuate their genes. In the end it leaves a lot of questions, which is only right. Science often hasn't got a clue and a lot of this book is as much speculation as fact, but it admits this.
This book doesn't really live up to it's promise. It's very interesting, but I felt like the author kept getting sidetracked by other, related, things to the main theme. The audio book was kind of annoying because it had parts with music in it and it really confused me. That's the main reason this b...
This book reminds me very strongly of Freakonomics. I don't know about Dr. Moalem being a "maverick," but he does take the unconventional approach to dealing with common health problems by looking at how our most common and serious ailments (heart disease, obesity, skin cancer and vitamin d deficien...
It's a light look at a variety of diseases and why it would be that they would continue to survive and perpetuate their genes. In the end it leaves a lot of questions, which is only right. Science often hasn't got a clue and a lot of this book is as much speculation as fact, but it admits this.
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