Complexity and Medicine: The Elephant in the Waiting Room

Thorough and unique, this record focuses on developing strategies for the prevention of noninfectious diseases. Discussing a number of ailments—including, coronary heart disease, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, asthma, and varicose veins—this meticulous account utilizes chaos theory and complexity theory to form hypotheses about the causes of these nonlinear diseases and argues that medicine has previously failed in applying these theories.