Adrenaline and the Inner World
An Introduction to Scientific Integrative Medicine
Publication Year: 2006
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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This book tells a life story, but it isn’t a biography. It paints a family portrait, but not of a human family. Instead, this book depicts the world’s most famous hormone, adrenaline, and its chemical family, the catecholamines (pronounced cat-a-COLA-means, or, if you are British, cat-a-coal-AYmeans). They are part of you. They have kept you alive and are keeping ...
1 The Inner World
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Inside you is an inner world, full of comings and goings and the beautiful paradox of seeming constancy despite continuous change.We are born, we develop and mature, we reproduce, we live out our lives, we get old, we get sick, and we die, yet for most of our existence we believe in our essential ...
2 The “Automatic Nervous System”
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Some bodily activities, like standing up and moving legs to walk across a room, are voluntary, conscious, and observable from the outside. Others, like digesting, sweating, and tightening blood vessels, are unconscious, involuntary, and automatic, and they may or may not be observable from the outside. The brain uses different parts of the nervous system to regulate ...
3 The Arbiters of the Inner World
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So much of the workings inside the body reflect the dynamic equilibria of production, release, recycling, and breakdown of catecholamines; so many researchers have spent so much of their careers learning about catecholamine systems and their intricacies; so much of importance to medicine and physiology is known about these systems; and so much of the history ...
4 The Rest of the Cast
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The brain has at its disposal many effectors to control the inner world, in addition to the components of the autonomic nervous system described classically by Langley and Cannon. These other effectors operate according to the same principles as those that apply to the traditional components of the autonomic nervous system. ...
5 Stress as a Scientific Idea
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The scientific integrative medicine approach can help understand how genetic changes already present at birth lead to degenerative diseases decades later, at the other side of life. This chapter develops a theory about this linkage; the starting point is stress as a scientific idea. ...
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The occurrence of stress does not require consciousness. Selye would have agreed with this assertion, because he claimed that stress reactions can occur in anesthetized animals, in lower animals without nervous systems or undergoing mechanical damage to denervated limbs, and even in cells cultured outside the body. In contrast, distress does require consciousness, because ...
7 Stress in Evolutionary Perspective
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Science depends on measurement. Measurement is the key link in the circular chain of the scientific method. The chain consists of observation, induction of an explanatory concept, derivation of a testable hypothesis, prediction, experimental design, measurement, data analysis, and inference, which enlighten further observation. Hopefully, accumulating experimental ...
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In dysautonomias, altered activity of one or more components of the autonomic nervous system adversely affects health. Dysautonomias can manifest as occasional episodes or chronic, persistent neurodegeneration. They occur in all age groups, from inherited genetic diseases in children to functional disorders in adults to autonomic failure in the elderly. Some entail ...
9 Tests for Dysautonomias
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There are four types of tests to diagnose dysautonomias: physiological, neuropharmacological, neurochemical, and neuroimaging. Physiological tests involve measurements of a body function in response to a manipulation such as standing, tilt-table testing, or a change in room temperature. Neuropharmacological tests involve giving a drug and measuring its immediate effects. ...
10 Treatments for Dysautonomias
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Successful treatment of dysautonomias requires an individualized program, which can change over time. Because the underlying disease mechanisms often are not understood well, treatment is likely to involve some trial and error. ...
11 Drugs and the Family
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All three members of the adrenaline family are powerful drugs. Adrenaline itself is the most potent. In current algorithms of the American Heart Association for Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS), adrenaline is the drug of first choice for sudden death from asystole, when the heart goes “flatline.” No other drug has such an ability to restore the electrical activity of ...
12 The Future Scientific Integrative Medicine
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In this book you have learned a lexicon for the political science of the inner world. You have come across many new words and phrases—effectors, homeostats, allostatic load, monitored variable, dysautonomias—and new perspectives about old ones—negative feedback, the autonomic nervous system, stress, distress, fight-or-flight, and, of course, adrenaline. I have used ...
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Page Count: 328
Illustrations: 49 illustrations
Publication Year: 2006