If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body - Hardcover

Hamblin, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385540973 ISBN 13: 9780385540971

Verlag: DOUBLEDAY & CO, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

"If you want to understand the strange workings of the human body, and the future of medicine, you must read this illuminating, engaging book." —Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene

In 2014, James Hamblin launched a series of videos for The Atlantic called "If Our Bodies Could Talk."  With it, the doctor-turned-journalist established himself as a seriously entertaining authority in the field of health. Now, in illuminating and genuinely funny prose, Hamblin explores the human stories behind health questions that never seem to go away—and which tend to be mischaracterized and oversimplified by marketing and news media.  He covers topics such as sleep, aging, diet, and much more:
 
• Can I “boost” my immune system?
• Does caffeine make me live longer?
• Do we still not know if cell phones cause cancer?
• How much sleep do I actually need?
• Is there any harm in taking a multivitamin?
• Is life long enough?
 
In considering these questions, Hamblin draws from his own medical training as well from hundreds of interviews with distinguished scientists and medical practitioners.  He translates the (traditionally boring) textbook of human anatomy and physiology into accessible, engaging, socially contextualized, up-to-the-moment answers. They offer clarity, examine the limits of our certainty, and ultimately help readers worry less about things that don’t really matter.

If Our Bodies Could Talk is a comprehensive, illustrated guide that entertains and educates in equal doses.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JAMES HAMBLIN is a writer and senior editor at The Atlantic magazine. He was a 2015 Yale University Poynter Fellow in journalism, and his work has been featured by the New York Times, Politico, NPR, BBC, MSNBC, New York, and The Awl. He was a finalist for the 2015 Webby award for Best Web Personality, and Time has named him among the 140 people to follow on Twitter. He’s based in Brooklyn, New York.

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PART ONE

APPEARING

THE SUPERFICIAL PARTS

Butterfly children” are so called because their skin is like butterfly’s wings. The name is meant to convey extreme fragility. But the weakness in butterfly wings is only a product of the fact that we are some one hundred thousand times larger than butterflies. In terms of biomechanics, these wings are actually paradigms of efficiency: light enough to be operated by a flying worm a fraction of their size, yet strong enough to hold up under the intense shear force of the wind and torrential rain that would be for us like standing under Niagara Falls.

The skin of a butterfly child, on the other hand, is rather an abject failure of biomechanics. Because of one detail. The formal name of the disease is dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, or DEB. It’s traditionally considered a pathology of the skin, the domain of the dermatologist, because it renders the skin like tissue paper that has been left in the sun. Such skin falls apart at the lightest touch. The condition has no cure. It is the worst disease you’ve never heard of. I write that without presuming which diseases you have heard of. The trademarked motto of the Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa Research Association is “the worst disease you’ve never heard of.” Its current executive director, Brett Kopelan, coined the phrase in earnest.

His daughter Rafi was born in a Manhattan hospital on November 19, 2007. Her mother, Jackie, was more than a little concerned that patches of skin were missing on their newborn’s hands and feet. She had been two weeks past due, and the doctors initially reassured Jackie and Brett that their baby had been “overcooked.” But the casual dismissal proved too casual when over the next few hours Rafi began bleeding. Nurses rushed her to the intensive care unit. There she would spend the first month of her life in complete isolation, undergoing a battery of tests, unable to be touched by her parents. After two weeks the doctors came to the Kopelans with a potential diagnosis, a name that would become their lives.

“They think it’s something called epi-­dermo-­lysis . . . ​bul­losa?” Brett recalls saying in a harried phone call with his brother, who is chief of surgery at a hospital just across the river in New Jersey, to which the surgeon replied, “Oh, shit.” Brett ran to Google and read about DEB. His first thought was that it was the worst disease he’d never heard of.

On the short arm of the third of your twenty-­three chromosomes sits a gene called COL7A1. It is responsible for the production of the protein that assembles collagen VII. Collagen proteins constitute all of the connective tissue in our bodies, and a third of our total protein. From the Greek for “glue,” collagen holds together everything from skin to ligaments and tendons. It comes in several known types (of which collagen VII is one).

Epidermolysis bullosa is a ­rare disease in several ways, not least in that much of the problem traces to a discrete gene. Most diseases are far more complex than any single gene can explain. But mutations in the COL7A1 gene seem to be responsible for all three major forms of dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, of which Rafi’s is the most severe.

Collagen VII anchors our outer layer of skin (epidermis) to our base layer (dermis). Without it, the layers separate and the skin crinkles and blisters, coming off at the slightest provocation. When Rafi reflexively scratches an itch, she wounds herself. The seams on her shirt cause blisters. Many mornings she wakes up with her pajamas pasted to her skin in multiple places by dried blood. The extrication is grueling.

And because collagen VII provides structure throughout the organs of her body, this affects not just the skin, but the internal organs as well. Blisters and scars within her mouth and esophagus make it difficult to chew and swallow food. She has eye inflammation that can lead to blindness. She has a very high risk of developing an aggressive type of skin cancer at a young age. She has osteoporosis, syndactyly (fusion of the fingers), and mild heart failure.

Rafi’s form of epidermolysis bullosa affects fewer than one in a million infants. For those who survive, life does not involve much interaction with other people. So it is a disease of people whom we are not likely to come to know. The spectrum of what most of us consider normal in our day-­to-­day lives is skewed strongly away from conditions like EB, and toward small blemishes. If it weren’t, we might be more appreciative of the skin that we have, and the simple fact that it adheres to our bodies.

The average person has about six pounds of skin. Like most (though not all) organs, it’s essential to life. If you woke up one day and your skin had vanished, you would quickly die. In what remained of your short life, there would be problems socially. It’s the largest and most dynamic organ in the human body, constantly turning over and regenerating. Skin, along with hair, is unique among body parts in that it is dead cells we carry around. In any other organ, dead cells are discarded. But the cells in skin and hair stay along with us for a while and serve important functions, not least of which is social identity and thus the foundation on which the understanding of ourselves is built.

The skin we had last year—­last season, even—­is not the skin we have today. Most of the cells that compose our bodies are constantly dying and being replaced. Around 8 percent of our genes are not even human, but viral. We are born with viruses woven into our DNA, and we contain trillions of bacteria that are responsible for, among other things, the appearances of our faces, our body weights, and our states of mind. Our bodies are dynamic networks of genetic information shaped by experience, and microbes that change who we are in every moment. We are born with signals that will tell us to go bald when most people would appraise us more favorably if we had hair, and to be anxious when we needn’t be, and to get cancers that we tried hard to avoid. The doling out of years and health and happiness will not be fair.

The seemingly superficial parts, and the way they are perceived by ourselves and others, accumulate into how we understand ourselves, and then into how we move through the world and treat one another.

How can I tell if I’m beautiful? I mean in the purely superficial physical way that I know I shouldn’t care about but do because I am a person who exists in the world.

In 1909, Maksymilian Faktorowicz opened a beautification establishment in Los Angeles. Under the name Max Factor, he would become famous for his cosmetic products, which he sold as part of a pseudoscientific process of “diagnosing” abnormalities in people’s (mostly women’s) faces. He did this using a device he invented called the “beauty micrometer.” An elaborate hood of metallic bands held in place by an array of adjustable screws, the micrometer could be placed over a woman’s head and, as one of his ads at the time claimed, flaws almost invisible to the ordinary eye would become obvious. Then he could apply one of his “makeup” products, a term coined by Factor, to correct the flaw in this person: “If, for instance, the subject’s nose is slightly crooked—­so slightly, in fact, that it escapes ordinary observation—­the flaw is promptly detected by the instrument, and corrective makeup is applied by an experienced operator.” Even if putting on a metal hood that could tell people exactly why they’re not beautiful didn’t seem wrong on...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: DOUBLEDAY & CO
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385540973
• ISBN 13: 9780385540971
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Doubleday; https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar