The Disease Delusion: Conquering the Causes of Chronic Illness for a Healthier, Longer, and Happier Life

Blood pressure, percentage of body fat, the level of glucose or triglycerides or cholesterol in our blood, the way that cholesterol is packaged in LDL or HDL forms: these are just some of the more common biomarkers, all of them signals that indicate how our genes are being translated into physiological, physical, and mental functions—gauges of our

The standard test measures the amount of glucose in the blood after an overnight fast; an elevated level is a hallmark of the disease. But it is possible for a person in the early stages of diabetes to produce a normal result on the fasting blood sugar test. A more telling measure is to determine how well the body can metabolize glucose; this can b

You tell your doctor you feel tired and you sort of ache all over. Pressed for specific details, you report that you haven’t been sleeping well, can’t concentrate, have no energy, and just feel wiped out. Trained in a pharmaceutical strategy that seeks one cause to explain one disease that can be treated with one drug, the doctor is stymied at best

did your last annual checkup include an electrocardiogram: an EKG? If so, that display of your heartbeat provides a good check for the presence of heart disease. But it is possible to have a normal heartbeat as recorded in an EKG, get a clean bill of heart health from your doctor, and suffer a heart attack on the way out of the doctor’s office. It

think of a disease as caused by an overly active step in one of the metabolic processes going on in the body—a single step that has gone out of sync or out of control. If you can find or create a substance that will interfere with that overly active step—block it, inhibit it, alter it in some way—you more or less transform the effect of the disease

What happens as a result? One outcome is that the disease or diseases will continue to progress over time. As this happens, the symptoms become more severe and more medications are required to alleviate them. In effect, these patients become lifetime consumers of medications that were expressly designed—and approved by regulators—to be used for a l

long-term outcome studies had ever been done on HRT until the Women’s Health Initiative study, the results of which were so alarming that the study directors felt morally bound to announce them early, before all the data were in. The study found that for many women, the particular combination of equine estrogens (Premarin, from pregnant mares) and

Biomarkers are indicators of our functional health status.

In a watershed 1980 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, Fries described the reserve of function in the body’s organs that, in youth, is well above what is needed for average everyday living. It’s like a savings account of extra biological capability that we can draw on when we need to—say, when we confront trauma, injury, or illness. At a