Research Catalog

Complexity and medicine : the elephant in the waiting room / Colin James Alexander.

Title
Complexity and medicine : the elephant in the waiting room / Colin James Alexander.
Author
Alexander, Colin James, 1920-2007.
Publication
Nottingham : Nottingham University Press, 2010.

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Description
x, 178 p. : ill.; 24 cm.
Summary
"This book takes Complexity Theory and applies it to medicine where it has previously made little ground. It provides new hypotheses for multiple common but misunderstood diseases. Doctors in particular will understand that many diseases have remained unsolved due to a linear approach to what are complex biological systems, and failure to understand and apply Complexity Theory. Therefore, many common conditions have no known cause and consequently treatments are either ineffectual or non-existant, when many of these diseases are in fact preventable. There is growing interest in non-linear science, dynamic systems, chaos and complexity theory. This trend has directly involved other sciences, including biology, but has been little touched on by medicine. Readers of this book will: understand the difference between Linear Science and Complexity Theory, and how medicine has failed to apply the latter; recognise the advantages of using this understanding to generate realistic hypotheses for cause of disease; and read how hypotheses so generated have been formulated for a number of common diseases."--Publisher's description.
Alternative Title
Complexity & medicine : the elephant in the waiting room
Subject
  • Disease > etiology
  • Nonlinear Dynamics
  • Diseases > Causes and theories of causation
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references.
Processing Action (note)
  • committed to retain
Contents
THE PROBLEM OF COMPLEX DISEASES: The failure of medicine: finding cause in complex diseases -- Chaos theory -- The complex self-regulating dynamic system -- A search algorithm for finding cause -- TESTING THE PATTERN-MATCHING MODEL: Idiopathic osteoporosis -- Chaos theory and Paget's disease -- Diseases of the spine -- Soft tissues, varicose veins, asthma -- Idiopathic osteoarthritis -- Search for a mechanism for the unused arc theory -- Search for a matching pattern -- Testing the unused arc hypothesis -- The obstacles to finding cause -- Poincaré, and the numbers fallacy.
ISBN
  • 9781907284564
  • 1907284567
OCLC
706780778
Owning Institutions
Harvard Library