Book Review
A Review of 50 Years Lost in Medical Advance:
The Discovery of Hans Selye’s Stress Mechanism
by Lewis S. Coleman, MD, FAIS
*This is an article from the Winter 2021 -2022 issue of Contentment Magazine.
By Elliott English
The clearest way for me to evaluate how good or significant I think a book is without the immediate afterglow following the completion is to simply count the number of times I’ve re-read the book. I am continuously re-reading and taking notes on this book — I’m perhaps on my sixth time. This is very rare for me. It’s not just good, it’s a bombshell. Saying that I am mostly evaluating the quality of ideas expressed. Yet I can also say that the book is overall well written with a bias towards details which I prefer. I believe anyone with a high school biology or physiology background would be able to sufficiently engage the material, but anyone can sort of test themselves by looking at his website: stressmechanism.com and then go to YouTube presentations. I happened to have found the website first and then was directed to the book.
The core theory with mechanisms and some practical applications are extremely insightful and should not be missed by anyone interested in their own health or in how our medical and research system is searching in unhelpful domains and applying less than helpful theoretical applications. This book and its theory need to find their way into the minds of our current thought leaders and funding recipients and anyone actually trying to reduce human diseases.
The core of Dr. Coleman’s argument has us looking at haemodynamics as the keystone in the human experience of health and disease.
I have been focused on physiology of aging for a number of years and the most promising results are also focused on blood modification, but in general they lack the theory provided here. We should all be paying much more attention to carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, metabolism, blood viscosity, thrombin and thrombin inhibition to be able to cure most modern diseases. Before reading this book, I was already convinced by epidemiology that all diseases have very similar mechanisms, and this book explains a, or perhaps the major part of those mechanisms.
Perhaps you’ve heard that aspirin reduces the risk of heart disease and cancer, this book explains the mechanism. If you’re paying attention to the anti-aging space, you know that metformin is being tested as an all-around anti-aging medicine…this book explains why and why we should expect that berberine might also be a reliable alternative. If you are curious how we could better treat COVID patients or any patients on a ventilator this book explains it. Why is vitamin D seemingly therapeutic for most modern diseases? Why does therapeutic plasma exchange work to reduce the phenotype of age and why might leeches and blood donation be something we should all consider much more often.
This book has THE mechanistic explanation. Hint: all answers are related to your blood and the stress response systems which dictates how viscous, or fluid, the blood is as well as how dilated the vasculature is and thus which cells get oxygen and nutrients. I recommend this book highly and hope others can also see the value put forth in it. If you want to have a better understanding of how to approach all major diseases: cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and many more conditions you need to read this book!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elliott English is currently serving as Director of Telehealth Operations for BlueStar Telehealth. Following military service as an officer and midshipman, he has served as a fiduciary for an endowment exceeding 1 billion in AUM and managed global teams in operations, metrics and data science for Morgan Stanley and New Zealand’s Pharmaceutical Asset Management Company. Elliott’s professional aspirations currently center around using technology and business insights to facilitate preventative care’s replacement of legacy healthcare. His pre-eminent personal hobby involves reading deeply in physiology and medicine in order to help friends and family solve problems ill-defined and dis-incentivized by existing medical institutions. He publishes on Substack: https://elliott333.substack.com/.
Contentment Magazine
The dictionary defines “content” as being in a state of peaceful happiness. The AIS magazine is called Contentment because we want all of our guests and members to find contentment in their lives by learning about stress management and finding what works best for each them. Stress is unavoidable, and comes in many shapes and sizes that makes being in a state of peaceful happiness seem like a very lofty goal. But happiness is easy to find once you are able to find ways to manage your stress and keep a healthy perspective when going though difficult times in life. You will always have stress, but stress does not always have you!
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