This book describes what may one day be remembered as the most important theoretical advance in medical history. The worldwide warfare of the 20th century produced an era of research rigor, vigor, integrity, and progress that inspired a prominent physician researcher named Hans Selye to hypothesize that a “stress mechanism” regulates physiology and explains disease. His concept was and remains the most promising prospect for an effective theory of medicine, and it inspired an intense international search for the stress mechanism that was abandoned and mostly forgotten after years of fruitless failure. However, powerful new theories typically arrive long before evidence becomes available to confirm them. Another 30 years of accumulating evidence from unrelated research has now enabled the author to identify the stress mechanism. It explains physiology and disease, and fulfills all the predictions and expectations of previous stress researchers. It promises to revolutionize medicine and provide powerful new treatments that will enable health, longevity, and freedom from the eternal curse of disease, suffering, and premature death. Stress theory exceeds the bounds of medicine and confers a “unified theory of biology” that explains embryology, evolution, anatomy, intelligence, emotion, “fight or flight,” the Cambrian Explosion, Lamarck, Baldwin, saltation, dinosaurs, and the origin of life. It paves the path to deciphering genomics and explaining embryological development, which will enable the ability to alter evolution, with implications that presently reside in the realm of science fiction.
Reviews
These reviews appeared on the Amazon website in several countries.
Jeanette Sutton
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thoroughly enjoyable, informative read
Amazon Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 July 2022 Verified Purchase
Anyone interested in medical sciences will enjoy Lewis Coleman’s detailed portrayal of our responses to stress because it explains so much, and in a uniquely entertaining way. For example, I have never believed that we really need quite as many as 13 clotting factors just to form clots and this book tells you the role each plays in the orchestra that responds when we are injured stressed. Then it also includes a the most cogent rationale for the appearance of amyloid as a product of stress to brain tissue, that I have been able to find. It is also an invaluable reference book with over 700 pages and many hundreds of references. I am an inventor, so I was delighted to read who discovered many of the advances that frame the Stress and the Capillary Gate theories. Dr Coleman traces their history, telling who thought of them and why and how some dropped out of favour before they were finally accepted. I also enjoyed the thought-provoking quotations that head up every chapter. The most eye-opening chapter was 18, The Hoax. It will fascinate anyone who has worked in an operating theatre or practiced emergency care anywhere. In my anaesthetic days we paralysed patients so we could ventilate them mechanically because then we optimised oxygenation and got rid of “toxic carbon dioxide.” How wrong we all were! We failed to realise our method was causing many needless deaths, or that we had been persuaded to use it by two fraudsters who became doyens of anaesthesia in America in the 1920’s and 30’s, Drs Waters and Leake. So, the book is not only a model compendium of medically essential facts, but a thoroughly enjoyable, informative read. At around £30 GBP for the on- screen version on Kindle, it’s hard to imagine anyone regretting the purchase.
John Edward Cannon
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not sure
Amazon Reviewed in Canada on 18 January 2022 Verified Purchase
A very smart and serious research colleague of mine suggested I buy and read this book. I am still not sure if I believe the author’s hypothesis. This is not main-stream thinking on the topic of inflammation and global human physiologic homeostasis.
Eric Parsons
5.0 out of 5 stars
It will stretch your mind
Amazon Reviewed in the United States on 13 February 2022 Verified Purchase
This is a an extremely ambitious book that actually succeeds in putting forth little known (as well as some completely unknown) ideas that upend much of the conventional thinking about biology, disease and medicine in general. It has been quite some time since a book I’ve read has provoked as much thought as this one. Almost every page has something that made me pull out my highlighter, close the book and ruminate on. Dr. Coleman is clearly a deep thinker and someone who doesn’t simply disagree with the conclusions of modern scientific consensus but rather with its very ASSUMPTIONS. This book can be enjoyed by anyone interested in Hans Selye’s Stress Theory, cancer, atherosclerosis, auto-immune disease or someone looking for a grand unified theory of biology. Most attempts to overthrow existing paradigms fall flat and are not very convincing. Dr. Coleman manages to outline several ideas that I feel will ultimately be accepted as self-evident. His thoughts on carbon dioxide are the fantastic and he provides significant evidence that something that was known in the 1930s (that CO2 is not a waste gas but instead critically important for tissue oxygenation) is forgotten to this day. How could something as fundamental to biology as the role of carbon dioxide in health and life remain such a secret? By explaining how Drs. Leake & Waters were behind a CO2 misinformation campaign, Dr. Coleman manages to show how these two men confused the world just as nutritionist Ancel Keyes almost single-handedly managed to do with the incorrect vilification of saturated fats. But that’s just part of the book. The author’s thoughts on auto-immune disease, cancer and atherosclerosis are each worth the price of admission. These are ideas I have not heard anywhere else. This often indicates crazy unsubstantiated ramblings but in this case Dr. Coleman does a good job of linking them together with plausible, if unconventional hypotheses. He does not always have the evidence to back up his ideas but he does put forth testable a hypothesis for many of them. His 30+ years as a practicing anesthesiologist, for instance, lend much credibility to his idea that our current thinking on putting people under needs to be heavily revised. He backs it up with very specific recommendations on how to improve things with certain drugs and anesthetic procedures. He does a very good job of talking about the specific dangers that have been introduced to anesthesiology practice in the last few decades as well as how to fix them relatively easily. This is a very strong part of the book and it makes 50 Years Lost in Medical Advance ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED READING for anyone who is interested in or currently practicing anesthesiology. It has the potential to revolutionize the way anesthesiology is practiced and has implications for most of the human beings on earth as almost all of us will be dependent upon this science at some point in our lives. There is so much more of interest in the book that I can really only scratch the surface. His explanations of how reptilian red blood cells are different from mammalian ones is fascinating. His historical review of the contributions of many historical contributors to biology makes for great reading as well. I can’t say that I am yet convinced by everything Dr. Coleman puts forth as his ideas are so novel they will require much more thinking about but I can say I so thoroughly enjoyed the reading experience that I wholeheartedly recommend this book for people who like to be challenged with ideas that might actually stand the test of time.
Love to Fly
5.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting
Amazon Reviewed in the United States on 17 June 2022 Verified Purchase
Easy to follow for non medical reader such as myself.
Cliente Amazon
5,0 de 5 estrellas
La mejor explicación del Sistema de coagulación
Revisado en España el 9 de febrero de 2022
He tenido la oportunidad de conocer y trabajar junto con el autor de este libro. Ofrece un oportunidad única de entender la teoría del estrés celular y su interacción con la Cascada de Coagulación (Tema que suele ser muy complejo de entender). En este libro se nos da la oportunidad de entenderlo de una manera clara y sencilla.
Traslation (via Google Translater):
The major explanation of the system of coagulation
I have had the opportunity to meet and work together with the author of this book. It offers a unique opportunity to understand the theory of cellular stress and its interaction with the Coagulation Cascade (a topic that is usually very complex to understand). In this book we are given the opportunity to understand it in a clear and simple way.
William Alan Mutch
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Stress Repair Mechanism – Implications for Anesthesia and Medicine
Amazon Reviewed in Canada on November 9, 2021
This work is an encyclopedic investigation into the stress mechanism originally proposed by Selye in the 1930s. As first proposed, the mechanism centered on the hypothalamic-pituitary-axis (HPA) in response to injury and disease. Coleman has re-discovered and extended these observations to develop a Stress Repair Mechanism (SRM) mediated by the vascular endothelium which functions as a vast neuro-endocrine gland orchestrating the vascular and tissue response to injury and repair via the coagulation cascade.(1) This is subdivided into a capillary gate component and a tissue repair component. The capillary gate is mediated through the intrinsic coagulation cascade and the gate is opened by NO via the parasympathetic nervous system and insulin and importantly by CO2. It is closed by a number of factors including sympathetic nervous system activity (modified by nociception and cognition) which generate endothelial Von Willebrand Factor (VWF) release and as a consequence increases blood viscosity, alters capillary bed flow, vascular resistance and decreases cardiac output. The tissue repair component is mediated by tissue factor released by injury, which binds Factor VII and initiates tissue repair orchestrated through thrombin activation. The broad implications of this mechanism are explained at length in the book and culminate in a Unified Theory of Medicine and Biology. A key feature of the book is a discussion of the influence of anesthesia management on modifying the SRM. It is the responsibility of the anesthesiologist to manage the SRM optimally to maximize patient care and thereby positively influence patient outcome. The SRM can be influenced through anesthesia management in two key ways – by attenuating the nociceptive and cognitive pathways. Nociceptive pathway activity is blocked by use of narcotics and NSAIDS, wound infiltration of local anesthetic agents and nerve blocks. Cognitive pathway activity is altered by sedatives and intravenous and volatile anesthetic agents. Coleman emphasizes that both of these pathways need be managed together to minimize the stress response to surgery. The tissue repair pathway cannot at present be manipulated intraoperatively due to release of tissue factor with surgical trauma. Targeted postoperative management of tissue factor would revolutionize surgical management and maximally control the SRM. Central to Coleman’s thesis is intraoperative CO2 management and the impact of CO2 on the stress response.(2) He maintains that modern anesthesia practice with hyperventilation and lower ET CO2 is counterproductive and harmful to patient outcome. He is harshly critical of some of the founding fathers of anesthesiology with considerable opprobrium directed to Ralph Waters and Chauncey Leak and their misrepresentation of the physiological actions of CO2.(3) He advocates a return to a prior time when CO2 was added to the inspired gases during the surgical procedure – an approach advocated by George Washington Crile and Yandell Henderson.(4) His identification of the SRM and the importance of the capillary gate indicates why higher CO2 tensions are salutary – CO2 opens the gate, releases NO, decreases release of VWF thereby lowering the inflammatory response, lowers blood viscosity, improves capillary blood flow, improves cardiac output, improves tissue oxygenation by the Bohr effect, better ensures delivery of antibiotics to site of action, facilitates volatile anesthetic agent uptake into the brain and removal at end procedure. Optimal anesthetic agent dose blunts the cognitive pathway, which attenuates the sympathetic activation that higher ET tensions of CO2 cause, further enhancing the effect of CO2 at the capillary gate. Supporting Coleman’s proposal are recent works indicating greater mortality and postoperative delirium with lower ETCO2 tensions as measured intraoperatively.(5)(6) I believe that this book by Lewis Coleman is a very important contribution to the medical literature, especially so to the anesthesia library. It should receive wide readership and initiate vigorous discussion of current medical management. The full implications of this compendious work could well alter all fields of medicine if research based on these ideas bear fruit. Research into the benefits of CO2 supplementation, or at the very least, preventing intraoperative hyperventilation, are easily accomplished studies in the anesthesia realm to begin testing the Stress Repair Mechanism. References: 1. Coleman LS. A stress repair mechanism that maintains vertebrate structure during stress. Cardiovasc Hematol Disord Drug Targets. 2010 Jun;10(2):111–37. 2. Coleman LS. A call for standards on perioperative CO2 regulation. Can J Anaesth. 2011 May;58(5):473–4; author reply 474-5. 3. Coleman LS. 30 years lost in anesthesia theory. Cardiovasc Hematol Agents Med Chem. 2012 Mar 1;10(1):31–49. 4. Coleman L. Four Forgotten Giants of Anesthesia History. J Anesth Surg. 2016;3(2):1–17. 5. Dony P, Dramaix M, Boogaerts JG. Hypocapnia measured by end-tidal carbon dioxide tension during anesthesia is associated with increased 30-day mortality rate. J Clin Anesth. 2017;36:123–6. 6. Mutch WAC, El-Gabalawy R, Girling L, Kilborn K, Jacobsohn E. End-Tidal Hypocapnia Under Anesthesia Predicts Postoperative Delirium. Front Neurol. 2018;9:678.
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolute must read for anti-aging and general medicine – covers all major categories of illness!
Amazon Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2021
The major obstacle for this book is the price, but it’s probably worth it if you want to really understand the body. The clearest way for me to evaluate how good or significant I think a book is without the immediate afterglow following the completion is to simply count the number of times I’ve re-read the book. I am continuously re-reading and taking notes on this book – I’m perhaps on my sixth time. This is very rare for me. It’s not just good, it’s a bombshell. Saying that I am mostly evaluating the quality of ideas expressed. Yet I can also say that the book is overall well written with a bias towards details which I prefer. I believe anyone with a highschool biology or physiology background would be able to sufficiently engage the material, but anyone can sort of test themselves by looking at his website: stressmechanism.com and then go to YouTube presentations. I happened to have found the website first and then was directed to the book. The core theory with mechanisms and some practical applications are extremely insightful and should not be missed by anyone interested in their own health or in how our medical and research system is searching in unhelpful domains and applying less than helpful theoretical applications. This book and its theory need to find their way into the minds of our current thought leaders and funding recipients and anyone actually trying to reduce human diseases. The core of Dr. Coleman’s argument has us looking at haemodynamics as the keystone in the human experience of health and disease. I have been focused on physiology of aging for a number of years and the most promising results are also focused on blood modification, but in general they lack the theory provided here. We should all be paying much more attention to carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, metabolism, blood viscosity, thrombin and thrombin inhibition to be able to cure most modern diseases. Before reading this book I was already convinced by epidemiology that all diseases have very similar mechanisms, and this book explains a or perhaps the major part of those mechanisms. Perhaps you’ve heard that aspirin reduces the risk of heart disease and cancer, this book explains the mechanism. If you’re paying attention to the anti-aging space you know that metformin is being tested as an all around anti-aging medicine…this book explains why and Why we should expect that berberine might also be a reliable alternative. If you are curious how we could better treat COVID patients or any patients on a ventilator this book explains it. Why is vitamin D seemingly therapeutic for most modern diseases? Why does therapeutic plasma exchange work to reduce the phenotype of age and why might leeches and blood donation be something we should all consider much more often. This book has THE mechanistic explanation. Hint: all answers are related to your blood and the stress response systems which dictates how viscous, or fluid, the blood is as well as how dilated the vasculature is and thus which cells get oxygen and nutrients. I recommend this book highly and hope others can also see the value put forth in it. If you want to have a better understanding of how to approach all; major diseases: cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimers and many more conditions you need to read this book!
Dan Kirsch
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book is a breakthrough in understanding how our bodies work
Amazon Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2021
This is a book to be carefully studied. A background in medicine or physiology would be very helpful but the author explains difficult concepts for the lay reader. Professor Hans Selye,” the father of stress medicine,” made the observation that people with widely varying diagnoses exhibited similar symptoms. He founded a new physiology based on a lifetime of research but there wasn’t sufficient science in his day to finish the task replacing putative concepts with known facts. Nevertheless, based on Selye’s work everyone knows about stress although few understand it. Finally, 50 years after Selye and based on nearly 30 years of his own research, Lewis Coleman, MD, FAIS has figured out what happens in those gaps in our understanding of physiology, as well as why so many of our current working hypotheses are wrong. Dr. Coleman has now perfected the stress mechanism, the unified theory of disease that Selye envisioned. All the time, money and human toll invested in attempting to cure cancer and so many other diseases made little progress because it was all based on an incomplete and often flawed physiology. Now if medical schools, researchers and governments embrace and shift resources along the way Dr. Coleman informs us, healthcare in the near future will not only be far more effective, but it will also be kinder, more gentle, working with our bodies rather than overpowering us. So called “modern medicine” will languish in history in the way we think of medieval medicine now. This book is the new bible of medicine and requires and deserves intense study and adoption in every field of healthcare. Dr. Lewis S. Coleman is truly the father of 21st century medicine.