Evolution Rx: A Practical Guide to Harnessing Our Innate Capacity for Health and Healing

Ever since I read The Moral Animal, I've been interested in how evolution has shaped human behavior. Enter Dr. William Miller's book, Evolution Rx, which I got recently for review.

Dr. Miller, who teaches a related class at the University of California, Santa Barbara, believes our bodies are mostly equipped to heal themselves, with the exception of dangers that weren't around in the caveman games (such as burns, smoking, and eating too much food). Too much food, indeed, seems to top the list of dangers.

Some of Miller's advice I liked, such as the idea that sun exposure and a little wine are actually good for you. Other ideas, such as Miller's description of morning sickness, made me want to dismiss all his ideas completely, because he was clearly guessing about the morning sickness.

As I've seen in my patients, an understanding that her discomfort is good for her baby -- along with sticking to easily assimilated foods -- eases symptoms without medication, in most cases.

LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE LIE

Anyway.

Overall, Miller's book is an easy and entertaining read, but it seems, like most of these books, to be too generalized. True, flitting about in the sun worked for our hairy, coarse-skinned forebears, but they didn't have to deal with air pollution or holes in the ozone layer. They may have survived toxic food, but they probably didn't do it easily or painlessly. We don't know. They didn't have Flip Video. And since they didn't, it seems flippant and overreaching to assume just because they were adapted to their environment that it -- like morning sickness -- was anything but suffering.

Comments

[Kristi]

Too bad there's not a pill where he can enjoy the many lovely side-effects of pregnancy, like morning sickness.

I can't help but think, "What a man thing to write." Gah.

[fioricet online]

I don't why people accept kind of opinion.