Our Animal Natures –How evolution unites human and veterinary medicicine

The below NYTimes essay is by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiology professor at U.C.L.A. and Kathryn Bowers, a writer. It is adapted from their forthcoming book “Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing,”   The book is the first to use an evolutionary perspective to unite animal and human medicine.  A webpage devoted to the book is here.

Our Animal Natures

AS an attending physician at U.C.L.A., I see a wide variety of maladies. But I also consult occasionally at the Los Angeles Zoo, where the veterinarians’ rounds are strikingly similar to those I conduct with my physician colleagues. Intrigued by the overlap, I began making careful notes of the conditions I came across by day in my human patients. At night, I combed veterinary databases and journals for their correlates, asking myself a simple question: “Do animals get [fill in the disease]?” I started with the big killers. Do animals get breast cancer? Stress-induced heart attacks? Brain tumors? How about shingles and gout? Fainting spells? Night after night, condition after condition, the answer kept coming back “yes.” My research yielded a series of fascinating commonalities.  (Continue reading at the New York Times)