1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910810553003321

Autore

West Bruce J

Titolo

Where medicine went wrong [[electronic resource] ] : rediscovering the path to complexity / / Bruce J. West

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Hackensack, NJ, : World Scientific, c2006

ISBN

1-281-92458-X

9786611924584

981-277-309-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (352 p.)

Collana

Studies of nonlinear phenomena in life sciences ; ; v. 11

Disciplina

616.075

Soggetti

Medicine - Philosophy

Fractals

Human physiology

Health status indicators

Nonlinear theories

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Contents; Prologue; Acknowledgments; 1. Chance and Variation; 1.1. The myth of equality; 1.2. Slaughter's CafeĢ; 1.3. What are the odds?; 1.4. Odds against smallpox; 1.5. Information and chance; 2. The Expectation of Health; 2.1. Control and cybernetics; 2.2. Temperature regulation; 2.3. Respiration regulation; 2.4. Cardiac regulation; 2.5. Averages are not sufficient; 3. Even Uncertainty has Laws; 3.1. Randomness and measurement; 3.2. Chaos and determinism; 3.3. Wisdom is not static; 3.4. A new tradition; 4. The Uncertainty of Health; 4.1. The different kinds of scientists

4.2. The Emperor in exile4.3. What is wrong with the law of errors; 4.4. The inverse power-law distribution; 4.5. How the physical and life sciences are different; 4.6. Only the few matter; 5. Fractal Physiology; 5.1. Scaling in physiological data; 5.2. Allometric relationships; 5.3. Fractal heartbeats; 5.4. Intermittent chaos and colored noise; 5.5. Fractal breathing; 5.6. Fractal gait; 5.7. Fractal temperature; 5.8. Fractal gut; 5.9. Fractal neurons; 5.10. Internetwork interactions; 6. Complexity; 6.1. Random networks; 6.2. Scale-free networks; 6.3.



Controlling complexity

6.4. Allometric control6.5. Disease as loss of control; 7. Disease as Loss of Complexity; 7.1. Pathological periodicities; 7.2. Heart failure and fractal loss; 7.3. Breakdown of gait; 7.4. Summing up; Epilogue; References; Index

Sommario/riassunto

Where Medicine Went Wrong explores how the idea of an average value has been misapplied to medical phenomena, distorted understanding and lead to flawed medical decisions. Through new insights into the science of complexity, traditional physiology is replaced with fractal physiology, in which variability is more indicative of health than is an average. The capricious nature of physiological systems is made conceptually manageable by smoothing over fluctuations and thinking in terms of averages. But these variations in such aspects as heart rate, breathing and walking are much more susceptible