Losing our Minds (Paperback) | Released: 30 Apr 2019

Ageing is not an inevitable and random process - it is both individual and alterable. Not to say we can reverse ageing completely (although some people have reversed the disease processes often associated with ageing), but we can modify the pace and outcomes significantly. In this groundbreaking book I look at life processes including healthy ageing and disease - but from a cellular point of view. With this more diminutive but complex perspective, we see that disease is not a natural consequence of ageing as modern medicine would have you believe. It is, in fact, a metabolic response to the toxicity of our lives; in the air we breathe, the food we eat, the thoughts we think and the relationships we have in this 21st century world. That we are destroying our environment with our imbalanced perspective on money and material gain as the sole focus of life, is not news to most people. But that this is being reflected at a cellular level with toxins clogging our inner world, is perhaps a new (but highly research-supported) area of understanding. The unprecedented (and accelerating) levels of toxic pollutants in our water and air during the last 50 years, most of which are novel to the body and therefore which it has not had time to adapt to, are destroying our inner world too. It is time to understand the myriad ways in which systems biology is contributing to a new understanding of the body as not composed of separate machine-like organs and tissues but a complex web of interactivity between the inner and outer worlds.By examining the nature of that world, we begin to understand how to better treat our body -something our ancestors knew well by trial and error and folklore and tradition. We need to look at it from the lens of technology - something which is available to us as never before: gene sequencing, functional MRI, real-time screening of metabolites (metabolomics), and analysis of the pharmacologically active components of plants, and so on are all giving us a new view of ourselves as one of a dynamic system, ideally in harmony or balance with its environment. Peturbations to this balance are what sets us on the trajectory of health or disease. with chapters on the structure and functions of the cell - with a particular focus on metabolism and mitochondria as the directors of those functions, I then move onto to describing how cells communicate with eachother and the results of those messages. I focus on 2 of the most significant diseases of ageing; dementia and cancer befor eending with a message of hope as to how using the power of the extended mind, (which includes interactions with the contributions of plants as well as our own thought processes) we can harness the power of nature to redirect the processes towards harmony once more.This book is the culmination of my gleaned knowledge from my career in health research, experience as a therapist and now, as a person also struggling with my own disease process (auto-immune thyroiditis) which I am trying to heal. My aim is to make the science accessible - whether the physiological or psychological which I combine - uniquely I feel. This new medicine sees a person as the sum total of all the events of their lives from birth onwards, and seeking to re-balance the body at a cellular level involves the mind and body in a unique choreography which I aim to illuminate from a practical as well as theoretical perspective. Read and be amazed. Your body is a miracle and you deserve to understand and harness it..