The Wisdom of the Body
The constant
conditions which are maintained in the body might be termed equilibria. That
word, however, has come to have fairly exact meaning as applied to relatively
simple physic-chemical states, in closed systems, where known forces are
balanced. The coordinated physiological processes which maintain most of the
steady states in the organism are so complex and so peculiar to living beings
--- involving, as they may, the brain and nerves, the heart, lungs, kidney and
spleen, all working cooperatively --- that I have suggested a special
designation for these states, homeostasis. The word does not imply something
set and immobile, a stagnation. It means a condition
--- a condition which may vary, but which is relatively constant.
It seems not
impossible that the means employed by the more highly evolved animals for
preserving uniform and stable economy (i.e., for preserving homeostasis) may
present some general principles for the establishment, regulation and control
of steady states, that would be suggestive for other kinds of organizations ---
even social and industrial --- which suffer from distressing perturbations.
Perhaps a comparative study would show that every complex organization must
have more or less effective self-righting adjustments in order to prevent a
check on its functions or a rapid disintegration of its parts when it is
subjected to stress. (p. 25)
To the
simple organisms which may be found attached to the rocks of the bed of a
stream the flowing water brings the food and oxygen needed for existence and
carries away the waste. These single-cell creatures can live only in watery
surroundings; if the stream dries they die or enter a dormant state. Similar
conditions prevail for the incalculable myriads of cells which constitute our
bodies. Each cell has requirements like those of the single cell in the flowing
stream. The cell f our bodies, however, are shut away from any chances to
obtain directly food, water and oxygen from the distant larger environment, or
to discharge into it the waste materials which result from activity. These
conveniences for getting supplies and eliminating debris have been provided by
the development of moving streams within the body itself --- the blood and
lymph streams. They work together to carry food, water and oxygen away from the
moist surfaces of the body and to deliver these necessities to the cells
situated even in the remotest nooks of the organism. From these cells in turn
they bring back to the moist surface, in the lungs and kidneys, the useless
waste of cellular activity which must be discharged. (p. 28)
Comments:
This is similar to work individually or work for a firm.
In their
course the lymphatic vessels are interrupted by nodes or “glands”, which act as
sieves and hold back small particles, such as bacteria, and keep them from
being widely spread through the rest of the body. (p. 35)
Comments:
These nodes are like checkpoints on roads.
Clearly the
same amount of blood must pass through the heart, the lungs, the arteries,
capillaries and veins during the same period of time, or otherwise the
circulation could not continue. Since the total cross-area of the capillaries
is much greater than the cross area of the aorta or the large veins leading to
the heart, the blood moves much more slowly in the capillaries than in either
the large arterial or venous trunks. This slow flow in the capillary region
gives time for the important exchange between the blood and the tissue cells
that occur there. (p. 36)
Comments:
The goods move much faster on roads than in stores.
When the
blood pressure falls in the arteries of the head, there is general constriction
of the blood vessel of the rest of the body. (p. 56)
Comments:
This shows how the symptom at the rest of the body may be caused by problems at
the head. See what medical applications we can find.
Comments:
Body tries to maintain constant conditions. Society tries to maintain constant
living standards. First, people will deplete their savings. Then start
borrowing. When the constant living standard is not been able to maintain, the
society often collapse catastrophically. This is similar to bodies, whose
failure to maintain constant conditions are often signs of serious trouble.
With a
salt-rich diet, one-third of the salt of the body may be in the skin; and after
an intravenous infusion of salt solution, between 28 and 77 per cent of the
retained salt is found in the subcutaneous connective tissue. … After a diet
poor in salt had been fed for some time the chloride content of the body may
fall between 11 and 21 per cent, and that between 60 and 90 per cent of this
amount is accounted for by losses from the skin layer. (p. 95)
Comments: Salt near the skin helps reduce sweat. Why
some people sweat more than others? Probably some people have more salt near
skin than others. But what determines the differential in skin concentration? From
the Chinese medicine, it is the strength of kidney. Try to make the connection
more direct. Why in the early days, it was encouraged to drink more salty
water, especially in summer when we sweat very often and right now, we are
encouraged to consume less salt? It is probably because we sweat much less now
than before, due to lifestyle and air conditioning.
The glucose
of the flowing blood is changed to glycogen in reserves which are set aside in
the cells of the liver and of muscles. When required for use it is changed back
to glucose again by the liver cells and then may be carried in the blood to
regions where it is needed. The glycogen of the muscle cells is changed to
lactic acid; this also may enter the blood and on reaching the liver, it is interesting
to note, may there be built back into glycogen again. (p. 102)
Comments:
When we start to exercise liver may feel pain because it has to work hard to
transform glycogen into glucose. When liver is weak, we feel tired easily
because liver cannot turn lactic acid back into glycogen and then to glucose quickly.
As a result, we don’t have enough energy supply to carry out our work.
Albumin,
water soluable proteins, is necessary for blood
vessels to contain large amount of water. The same albumin,
if exist abundantly under the skin, will cause edema. So the material
that is veryhelpful in one area may be very harmful
in another area.
Smilarly, high speed is necessary on highway to
deliver goods quickly over ong distance. But low
speed in residential areas is essential to ensure safety of children playing
outside.
In
the human economy no storage of oxygen has been provided. Food and water may
not be always available, and stocks are accumulated in times of plenty for use
in times of shortage. Oxygen, on the other hand, is always present as about 21
percent of the great ocean of air all about us. We can take it whenever we need
it. Storage is therefore unnecessary. (p. 146)
Comments:
In abundantly provided societies, saving rates are naturally low. In uncertain
societies, saving rates are naturally high. Therefore in
welfare societies, iti s
impossible to push up saving rates. Similarly, in societies with little safety,
saving rates are inevitably high, even if attempts are made to "stimulate
consumption". While saving rate of an individual is a personal decision,
the average saving rate of a society is an institutional character.
Thus
during highly strenuous exercise the intake of oxygen may be from 10 to 12
times what it is during rest and yet be far short of what is actually needed at
the time. ... We therefore borrow the ability to go on working beyond the limit
set by the oxygen available, but only on condition that we take in enough
oxygen later to burn the accumulated waste. We thus run up ... an "oxygen
debt". ... In a man who ran 225 yards in 23.4 seconds, normal quiet
breathing did not return until 27 minutes after the end of run. The extra
oxygen used during that period, above that used in the quiet state during a
similar period, measures the amount of debt. (p. 148)
Comments:
The same is true for a society. If the society consume too much in one period,
then the economy has to be depressed for a long period of time to recover from
that high level of consumption.
If these
limits are exceeded the effects are disastrous; with an acid fluid the heart
relaxes and ceases to beat, and with a more alkaline fluid it also ceases
to beat but usually stops in the contracted phase. (p. 170)
Comments:
Find out why they are like that.
There is a
daily swing from a low point about 4 am, when the thermometer readings average
36.3 C to a
Comments:
What are the health implications of this pattern?
To preserve
a steady state of the fluid matrix in this strange and foreign world requires
physiological operations which have not previously been exercised. Time is
required to render them efficient. If newly-born babies, therefore, are exposed
to even a moderate degree of cold they suffer a sharp drop of body temperature.
And … the body-sugar concentration of infants oscillates from day to day and
from hour to hour much more than that of adult. (p. 203)
When an
engineer estimates the weights which a bridge or beam must support, or the
pressures to which a boiler will be subjected, he does not provide merely for
those stresses in building the structure. The engineer multiplies his estimates
by three, six or even by twenty, in order to make the structure thoroughly
reliable. The greater strength of the material, above that calculated as
necessary, measures what is known as a “factor of safety.”(p. 231)
Comments:
What is the “factor of safety” in financial system? Whenever financial crisis
occurs, prominent economists would argue that social science is not an exact
science like engineering. But the real difference between an engineering
project and financial institutions is not whether they are “exact” or not, but
the difference between their safety factor.
Put the
above quotes to Regulation, Return and Risk.
The active
tissues of most of the organs exceed greatly what is needed for a normal
function of these organs. In some organs the surplus amounts to five, ten or
even fifteen times the quantity representing the actual requirement. In the
organs of reproduction the superabundance and waste of tissue for the sake of
assuring the success of the function is marvelous. Furthermore, the potential energies with
which some organs, like the heart, diaphragm, etc., are endowed are very
abundant and exceed by far the needs of the activities of normal life. The
mechanisms of many functions are doubled and trebled to insure the prompt
working of the function. In many instances the function of one organ is assured
by the ready assistance afforded by other organs. The continuance of the
factors of safety is again protected by the mechanisms of self-repair peculiar
to the living organism. We may, then, safely state that the structural
provisions of the living organism are not built on the principle of economy. On
the contrary, the superabundance of tissues and mechanisms indicates clearly
that safety is the goal of animal organism. (p. 240, quotes from Meltzer)
Comments:
The safety goal is also consistent with long term economy.
As we have
seen, there are various ways in which through many years the normal state of
the organism is maintained or its disturbed balance reestablished by automatic
physiological reactions. … If the body can largely care for itself, however,
what is the use of a physician? … Again, the physician realizes better than the
layman that many of the remarkable capacities of the organism for
self-adjustment require time --- all of the processes of repair belong in that
class --- and that they can play an important role only if they are given the
chance which time provides. …Finally, a great service which the physician
renders is that of bringing hope and good cheer to his patients. That alone
justifies his presence. (p. 242)
Comments: At
what price for physicians and the medical industry?
Although adrenin is distributed by the blood and can therefore
cooperate with sympathetic impulses to produce the same effects which they
produce, what is the evidence that this cooperation is useful? First, there are
indications that circulating adrenin prolongs the
effects of sympathetic activity. Britton and I have reported a continued
acceleration of denervated heart , during nearly a
half hour after one minute of excitement, although the animal, after the
momentary disturbance, was resting serenely on a cushion. When conditions
require prolonged activity, therefore, the secreted adrenin
would be advantageous. (p. 256)
Comments:
Nerve systems are faster in stimulating but hormones have longer and stronger
impact. Transplanted hearts are no more linked to sympathetic and
parasympathetic nerves. When people with transplant hearts exercise, they have
to wait for about ten minutes for the heart beat to accelerate with increased
adrenaline.
Information transmission require channels. In
standard economic theory, it is often assumed that information is reflected in
prices and markets instantly. However, if proper channels are not available,
the public will not know the information until very late. For example, frauds
in financial institutions have permeated for many years. However, because of
the lack of exposure from the media, the general public know no knowledge of
these frauds until the full scale development of the financial crisis. Even
after the financial crisis, there is little report about the scale of frauds.
The
homeostasis of blood sugar, also, is markedly influenced by sympathectomy.
This fact was established by determining the effect of emotional excitement on
blood sugar before and after sympathetic extirpation. … Excitement from three
to ten minutes causes in the normal cat an average increase of blood sugar
amounting to 34 per cent. In sympathectomized cats,
on the other hand, similar durations of excitement results in no consistent
rise in the glycemic level. (p. 276)
Comments:
The function of emotion and mind is to prepare for the readiness of physical
activities. There is a long tradition
of separation between mind and matter in modern science. But psychology is best
understood as part of physiology.
Once we
understand how psychology affects physiological states of our body, it is easy
to understand how our mind affects our health. In particular, we can understand
many properties of human physiology that accelerate the rate of human chemical
and mechanical reactions, which once were helpful to our survival, are not
helpful to a long life in an emergency free modern world.
Exposure to
cold or heat reveals another defect of sympathectomized
animals. … After sympathectomy a cold environment
does not cause erection of hair, that is, cold has no local contractile effect
on the pilomotor muscles. The smooth muscles of the
blood vessels are likewise not subject to nervous government; and, again, cold
has no local contractile effect on them. For these two reasons heat loss is no
longer controlled. In addition, the organism has been deprived of the service
of an increased secretion of adrenin which accelerate
heat production when the body temperature tends to fall. (p. 278)
One of the
most striking features of our bodily structure and chemical composition that
may reasonably be emphasized, it will be recalled, is extreme natural
instability. Only a brief lapse in the coordinating functions of the circulatory
apparatus, and a part of the organic fabric may break down so completely as to
endanger the existence of the entire bodily edifice. (p. 286)
Comments: In
other words, all life is in non-equilibrium states. So is our society.
Overall,
this is a great book that connects different parts of human body from a unified
principle. In more recent textbooks, many more details are added. But there is
less efforts to connect different dots.