The Beautiful Cure
Revealing the Immune System's Secrets and How They Will Lead to a Revolution in Health and Wellness
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A leading expert explains how discoveries about the immune system are leading the way to a revolution in beating cancer and other diseases.
The immune system holds the key to human health. The scientific quest to understand how it works--and how it is affected by stress, diet, sleep, age, exercise and our state of mind--is now unlocking a revolutionary new approach to medicine and well-being.
The body's ability to fight disease and heal itself is one of the great mysteries and marvels of nature, but within the last few years, painstaking research has resulted in major advances in our understanding of the immune system, revealing an inner world of breathtaking sophistication, complexity and beauty. Far more powerful than any medicine ever invented, it also plays a crucial role in our daily lives. Already we have found ways to harness these natural defences to create break-through drugs and therapies that can beat cancer, diabetes, arthritis and many age-related diseases, and we are starting to understand how activities such as mindfulness might play a role in enhancing our physical resilience.
Written by an expert at the forefront of this adventure, The Beautiful Cure tells a dramatic story of detective work and discovery, of puzzles solved and of the mysteries that remain, of lives sacrificed and saved, introducing the reader to this revelatory new understanding of the human body and what it takes to be healthy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Davis (The Compatibility Gene), a professor of immunology at Manchester University, provides health-conscious readers with a broad overview of his specialty. His book concentrates on two main tasks: sharing scientific facts about how the immune system works, and celebrating the heroes and rebels of immunology and their breakthroughs, from Edward Jenner's 1796 development of a smallpox vaccine to Charles Janeway's 1989 theory of how the immune response is triggered. At present, scientists are experimenting with ways of manipulating the immune system, in order to support beneficial and supplant dangerous behavior by cells that can prevent or cause disease. This is a relatively new form of fighting disease, and challenging for a layperson to understand, but Davis clearly explains how the immune and nervous systems carry on a "dialogue" and employ "a collection of mechanisms" to keep the body from attacking its own healthy cells. Davis leaves readers with a reminder that, for all the scientific innovations described here, the human immune system remains "far more powerful than any medicine we have devised," and that sleep, healthy eating, mindfulness, and other complementary practices all appear to help. A modern equivalent of Paul de Kruif's 1926 classic, Microbe Hunters, Davis's work is concise and illuminating.
