Teo Degas' Books & Decks

Ayurveda for Dummies is a basic approach to what Ayurveda holistic medicine is, its origins, principles, practices, beliefs, ways to incorporate it into your life, and traditional remedies. 

I didn't know much about Ayurveda, beyond Ayurveda beauty and relaxing treatments, so it is great putting things into perspective to  understand how a whole continent and culture approaches health, wellness, disease and healing.

Put it simply, Ayurveda is an alternative and millenarian medicine system born and widely practised in India, but with many devotees and practitioners all over the world. Many of the practices are common-sense ways of taking care of your body mixed with traditional herbology and Eastern philosophy and beliefs.The originality of Aryuveda resides in its integrative philosophy, in which body, mind, soul and energy are all interrelated and presented in your body; a system in which your lifestyle, diet, exercise, and spiritual practices are extremely important and clearly related. Yoga is an integral part of the system as well as herbal remedies. Also characteristic of Ayurveda is the classification of human beings into three basic doshas or types (these doshas have common traits regarding their physical constitution, temperament, psychology, levels of energy and ways in which the body reacts to food and healing). Aryuveda considers sickness an expression of lack of balance in the body. Aryuveda, as Western Medicine, has different branches and specialities.

The Ayurvedic mode of living aims to maximise your lifespan by optimising your health through interventions that care for your body, mind, spirit and environment. Ayurveda places a great emphasis on the prevention of disease and on health promotion, as well as on a comprehensive approach to treatment. (...) Ayurveda places great emphasis on the effects of the different seasons and your diet on the equilibrium of the body (...) Ayurveda recognises the importance of the environment to your health (...) addresses eating the best food to improve your immune system. (Locations 453-455, 484-485, 489-490 and 495)

Isn't that the aim of Western Medicine and dietetics? Ayurveda reminds me immensely of pre-modern Western Medicine, the one in which body and soul, mind and body were tightly linked, a Medicine based in the four temperaments-humours-elements minus the Yoga and the chakras.

However, I want to mention two things that caught my attention and I find utterly intriguing and specific to Ayurveda. The first is that Ayurveda cannot be separated from the Sanskrit word:

The second is the consideration of the individual as a part of a cosmic whole:

Commentators of Ayurveda, tells us that ‘Each individual is the unique expression of a recognisable finely tuned cosmic process occurring in space and time.’ (...) Because you are formed of the same substance as the creation, you are truly a microcosm of the universe.(Kindle Locations 575-580)

Explaining some of the concepts in Ayurveda is not easy, but Murry does a great job at introducing those concept for us, adding very useful explanatory tables and illustrations, and providing us with Western medicine terminology to match the one found in Ayurveda.

I am a fan of tables, Anything can be explained, clarified and organised in them. This being the case, I really like the many tables in this book, which are really helpful. They are great to discover what your dosha is, the best foods, exercises and medical approaches for every dosha, the characteristics of chakras and so on. The illustrations are also very helpful and simple to understand.

Many items of advice in the book can easily be incorporated into your daily routines if you feel like, even if you don't want to follow Ayurveda. Murray is keen to provide readers with simple remedies to be incorporated into our lifestyle, some of them might be for you while others might not.

I found very useful the glossary of Sanskrit words and the botanical glossary with equivalences between Sanskrit, Latin, Hindi and English names. If you are really into Ayurveda, the final appendix contains a list of links to suppliers of herbs, journals, organisations and institutes of Ayurvedic education that will come handy.  

Murray takes literally that she is writing for dummies and some of the writing is overly simplistic, repetitive, bloggish, and some of the content in the book a series of truisms that apply to the way of understanding well-being by your grandma or you if you have a minimum dose of common sense and are keen on keeping healthy. 

The formatting has too many headings and too large (some of them occupy the space of four lines, see photo), and to me this always feels as a naughty way of filling pages, not a way or making the headings and subheadings clearly visible.  

Take the style of Michael Moore's documentaries and old TV Shows, mix it with the explanatory style that you find in TED Animated Shorts on various scientific subjects, put it in comic form, add some personal graphic style. Voila! You have Science Tales. 

Science Tales is a book on what science does, how it does it, and why it is a reliable method of understanding and explaining the world. It is also a book on what Science is not. More importantly, it is a book on the importance of critical thinking to deal with any scientific or Fringe Science issue. His approach would also be valid for subjects that are not scientific, like History, or TV watching, for example.  

The themes discussed in Science Tales are: Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), homoeopathy, the case of Andrew Wakefield and the anti-vaccination nonsense, chiropractic, the landing on the moon hoax, fracking, climate change, evolution, and science denial. 

Cunningham  makes two terrific points in his foreword, which will help you to understand the way and passion he invests in explaining the themes discussed in the book:

Cunningham is a passionate author and graphic artist and you can feel that when you read Science Tales. He has the virtue of digesting scientific information that can be difficult to understand (all the fracking issue or the way genetic selection works for example) and present it in a visual and textual way that is easy to understand by anybody, a child in high school or your great-grandma.

I love Cunningham graphic style. It is very simple and schematic, a bit cubist!, but he has an amazing sense of colour and of aesthetics. Each chapter has a a different scheme colour that goes perfectly with the theme at hand. I always love such visual mindfulness! And some of the vignettes are very humorous as well. One of the things I did not like in the illustrations is when he inserts retouched or filtered digitalised images, which work well visually in some cases but not in others. Cunningham could have perfectly drawn those images himself, and the final result would have been more harmonious visually. 

Cunningham says that the reason why he choose the themes he discuses in his books is they were hot topics on any science blog or podcast when he wrote it. That is, they were mainstream topics of discussion. To me, that is one of the flaws of the book, that there is little that you would learn or have not heard of when reading the book as there are plenty of documentaries, scientifically backed, on some of the issues that Cunningham discusses. Why not focusing on other scientific topics that are less known to the masses? For example, how Statistics and are used to manipulate mass opinion, create false opinions and perceptions of the reality of certain social, cultural or ethnics groups. Or the use of psychology at the stock market to put down whole nations speculating on supposedly scientific mathematical/economical evaluations. What about the use of quantum physics to explain New Age religious stuff? What about magic diets backed up by doctors, which turn to be really damaging? Just giving some ideas, Cunningham!  

Also, using an episode of Mythbusters as a scientific reference defeats his own purpose or being, well, very scientific. Come on, hello hello, can't you see that?!Still, this is a very educative enjoyable book.

I am quite happy with the rendering of the book for Kindle. It is easy to read, the page to move around, zoom in and out. 

Siegel is a Harvard-trained psychotherapist who has developed a branch of medicine called Interpersonal Neuro-biology, an innovative method of integrating brain science and psychotherapy, which considers the mind something that goes beyond the brain.

I really love his approach to human psychology, the fact that this is not a book about alternative medicine or self-help, but very alternative in its scientific approach to psychotherapy. The parts of the book I enjoyed the most are the pages devoted to specific medical cases that Doidge himself treated, which show how this sort of therapy works.

The two basic elements of Mindsight, which provide the individual with emotional stability and development are, according to this book, integration and flexibility. Integration is necessary for the mental and social health of the individual and is acquired in different ways: 1/ integration of consciousness. 2/ Horizontal integration (right and left hemispheres of the brain). 3/ Vertical integration (brain to body). 4/ Integration of explicit and implicit memory. 5 /Integration of our personal narrative, that is how we construct and describe our past and present to the world. 6/ Integration of our different social and emotional states. 7/ Integrating of the "I" with society and the real world. 8/ Integration of life and death, as we are born to die.

The main drawback of the book, to me, is the very long introduction describing how the various parts of the brain and how the brain operates. Page after page with too much information. The target of the book is the general public, so a shorter version, and more structured, it would have worked better. After all, the main target of the book is the general public, not the medical profession.Moreover, Doidge is not especially didactic, not even well-structured, so this part is -or it was for me- difficult to swallow.

Have you ever wondered why do some doctors make stupid errors and others solve very difficult puzzling medical cases? How does a doctor decide that you have disease X from the gazillion possible diseases that your symptoms could be related to?

The answer is in the way approaches and listens to the patient,and, most importantly, how he processes all the information and data on each individual case - how a doctor's brain work is more important than the knowledge he has. How a doctor thinks is something that profoundly affects all of us every time we go to the doctor.

The book focus on many aspects related to diagnosing an illness an how doctors' brain works to make an accurate diagnosis, and the many elements that are required for it, when you visit many dozen of patients a day, sometimes more than you can attend to. Groopman also demonstrates what a good doctor thinks, acts and behaves like, and what separates a good doctor from a bad one, giving precise tangible information.  

The book mentions a good deal of real medical cases, some of them fascinating, all entertaining and interesting. Groopman has the ability to be scientifically rigorous but conveying his message in a simple, organised and understandable way to the lay reader. The different chapters are devoted to different types of doctors: general practitioners, specialists, surgeons, radiologists (this one is one of my favourite chapters and totally unknown to most of us), paediatricians, the pressure of the pharmaceutical industry on doctors, and the care of the elderly. All of them are fascinating and, in some cases, eye opening. The most important chapter is perhaps the one devoted to us, the patients to be, on how to redirect our relation with your physicians when they haven't been able to solve our ailment after a few visits. The book leaves out, the issue of diagnosis in psychiatry, which would certainly make another fascinating book.  

I loved seeing criticised by a physician medical behaviours that are widespread amongst the profession, though ethically reprehensible, of which I am whining about. For example, the fact that some GPs don't look at your face while you are talking to them, those who don't listen to what you are saying, those who don't examine you when they should, those who are  interested in getting points with the pharmaceutical industry or promoting surgeries that aren't necessary, and, most importantly, those who treat me as a case not as patient with thoughts and feelings. Indeed, Groopman demonstrates that if some doctors saw and related to their patients more like a patient and not as a medical case, there would be less medical errors.  

This one of those books that any medical practitioner, any medical student and any person visiting a GP should read and keep fresh in his-her mind. I can guarantee you that you will not be bored with the reading, and that  you will never think of doctor, look at him, or relate to him, in the same way ever again.

"In synesthesia two or more senses are automatically and involuntarily coupled such that a voice, for example, is not only heard, but additionally felt, seen, or tasted." It is a genetic modification that affects sensory perception and mixes sensations and perceptions that are separated in different areas of the brain, so it can  alleatorily mix sounds with colours, touch with images, numbers with music, and so on. Synaesthesia has forced neurologists to rethink the traditional block/area division of the brain in self-sufficient and independent areas that are devoted to specific tasks and worked its play in the validation of neuroplasticity.

The book is written by two neurologists and synesthesia researchers, and offers the reader a clear, entertaining and well organised description, categorisation and analysis of the different neurological conditions called synesthesia, which affected, among other famous people, writer Nabokov and painter Kandinsky. The books is scientifically rigorous but written in a very approachable language, easily understandable by the lay reader, with a great deal of pictures, diagrams and drawings that will help you to understand better. Still, it contains the notes, footnotes, bibliography necessary to made it academic-friendly. The book as an epilogue by Navokok's son Dimitri, who, like his father, is also a synaesthete.

 

The book can be a bit dry at times, as the matter is scientifically described and categorised, but here the detail in the description is not superfluous as it serves to highlight the many variations and varieties of synaesthesia, a word that in fact describes things that are very different from a perceptual and sensorial point of view.

The tones and writing styles of the two authors are evident through the book, even though none of the chapters is attributed to any of them explicitdly. The last two chapters are, perhaps, the most interesting ones for both neurology students and neurology aficionados.

The edition of the book is wonderful, with glossy paper, coloured headers and footers differentiated by chapter, and plenty of illustrations. One o those books that are rarely published in our modern times, especially because the book is directed to the general public not just the medical world. A book difficult to find and a bit expensive that, however, you can borrow from your local library and really enjoy. 

The book will fascinate you, especially if you haven't heard or read anything about synaesthesia before, and have a fascination for neurology and the study of the brain.

Norman Doige, a well-respected psychiatrist and psychotherapist, has written one of the most impacting books you have read in the last years. So much so, that despite this being a book on Medicine, Medical Research and the Brain, has been read by million of people who came to it by worth of mouth.

The book is written in a very simple language, accessible to the lay, to people like you and me who are not medical professionals or know too well the intricacies of our brain or neurology. At the same time, the book is scientifically rigorous, with the expected footnotes and bibliography needed to be so. Moreover, Doidge has the rare virtue of being entertaining when writing about medical experimentation and about medical researchers. 

The book, in the first place, narrates the painful birth of neuroplasticity within the Medical world, showcasing the many different experiments and research projects that lead to the official recognition of this field by the Academia. It also exemplifies, to me, the dogmatism and rigidity of our modern scientific community, that rejects ideas that are scientifically sound and logic, even proven, beating up those who dare to propose them, until the evidences are so overwhelming that they have to recognise the obvious but without any apology. Secondly, and most importantly, you will find an explanation of what neuroplasticity is and how it works, and what means in practical terms for our health, for the treatment of brain damage and malformations, and for the understanding of what our brain is, and how mind and body are intricately related.

I spent the first 70-80 pages of the book saying WOW to myself, unable to put the book down. It is not just me. Most people who have read it, will tell you the same.

A book that anybody with a brain should read. So run and grab your copy.