An Elegant Defense Book Review

This is another book that totally caught me by surprise. I was not exactly keen to read this as I am quite weary of any medical related books that tend to get too scientific with all the medical terms that cause great confusion. It also does not make very enjoyable or smooth reading especially one that talks solely about immune system. Not surprisingly books written by medical or scientific writers are usually page turner or great story tellers. I got interested in more health or medical related readings started off by one of my earlier post.

This book “An Elegant Defense” by Matt Richtel is a total surprise. Not only did he make it very easy to understand, he manage to make it into one both educational, enlightening, exciting as well as one with a good story line. I never imagine I could even call a book about medical discoveries a page turner.

As I do not have such writing skills like Matt Richtel, I will keep it really brief to say what this book it about. The book tells you the history of how scientist discover the immune system and how they made it to work over time to heal or immunized against scary diseases. Diseases like small pox, tuberculosis, measles and many more would have wreck havoc in modern world without such hero or heroine that step up.

One of the most exciting study now is the experiential treatment of activating our own immune system to treat cancer. The traditional and mainstream way is now chemotherapy or radiotherapy which is the nuclear option. It can destroy the cancer cells but it will only destroy the good cells. That is why many cancer patients are also losing the fight due to the compromised immune system after such treatment.

This new treatment aim is to activate the cells in our immune systems and instruct it to fight the bad cancer cells. Thus it is more like a sniper and very targeted than an artillery attack that wipe out everything in its path. You will hear the now famous “T-cells” and several other recent discovered cells that work together to fight the foreign invaders in our body. You will be amazed how our human body works and scientist are now only discovering more about the immune system and how much more we can make it work. Now they have discovered how to turn it on, direct the attack on the cancer cell, increase the intensity of the attack and also turn it off. I think the challenge is with the balance as it comes with many complications.

There are actual cases of the immune system working but it is far from perfect as it is still in the early experimental stages of such treatment. The writer’s good buddy is one who went through this and it is amazing how the immune system was activated to fight the huge tumor growing in his body.

Reading this book gave me hope that one day there will be a gentler treatment for cancer or other killer disease. We all have known of friends and relatives suffering and dying of cancer. This looks very promising and hopefully cancer treatment will not be as dreaded as it is now in the near future. That will be my most earnest hope for the future.