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| Where Medicine went Wrong. Rediscovering the Path to Complexity | Buy a book...
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| Author(s): | B. J. West |
| Publisher: | World Scientific |
| ISBN: | 9812568852 |
| Format: | softback |
| 337pp | |
| Price: | £22.00 |
| Review Date: | 28 January 2007 |
| Review: | The author begins by arguing that the history of Western civilization has formed the way that we view the world. In particular how medicine was affected by such public health decisions such as inoculating a population against smallpox in the seventeenth century. He reasons that society determined to adopt average measures as the way of thinking about complex systems such as the human body. However, there are variations, and the fluctuating behaviour of variables differ depending on whether they are part of a simple or complex phenomenon. By looking at complexity, the author replaces traditional physiology with fractal physiology, in which variability is more indicative of health then is the average. The variations in such measurables as heart rate, breathing and walking are much more susceptible to the early influence of disease than are averages. |