On Stress Disease and Evolution: A Unifying Theory

Abstract

I present a perspective on disease mechanisms developed over my years of clinical experience. In Part I, I look at the history of data synthesis in medicine and medical science, and find it to be rather haphazard. I suggest a new way of building up the clinical information to a reasonable conclusion based on individual patient data. Part II then applies that approach to understanding disease mechanisms, and concludes that arterial constriction, caused largely by sympathetic activation under the influence of stress, is likely to be an important initiating factor in many cardiovascular diseases, particularly heart attack and stroke. I go on to look at the possible role of such vasoconstriction in other disease. Part III suggests that arterial constriction may even be important in cancer pathogenesis and evolutionary mechanisms, through ischemic (blood flow reduction) destabilisation of a genome composed essentially of naturally genetically-engineered viral modules. The important conclusion then is that evolution is perhaps best seen as natural genetic engineering.