After my most recent book review, on Walter B. Cannon’s classic book “The Wisdom of the Body,” I said I was going to read Jay Schulkin’s book “Rethinking Homeostasis.”
Pretty cover!
I’ll be completely honest with you. I got about halfway through the 170 pages of text (the other 160 pages of the book are all references!) before I started to skim.
Schulkin reviews a lot of the literature about what he calls “allostatic” mechanisms in the body. For Schulkin, “allostasis” is the body’s management of forces to achieve stability – but primarily through physiological/behavioral mechanisms.
This is, for him, something that is in addition to Cannon’s concept of homeostasis (“stable through sameness”), which focused on the management of the “milieu interieur” (Claude Bernard’s term) – the interior climate of the body – through physic0-chemical processes (sodium balance, lipid (fat) carbohydrate and protein use/storage, etc.).
The proponents of allostasis aren’t saying that homeostasis needs to be chucked out the window, just that it’s an incomplete concept, and that the concept of allostasis (literally “stable through variability”) rounds it out, completes it, by including behavioral change designed to maintain the system’s internal stability, and physiological-systems change designed to do the same.
I had a very hard time, though, seeing the need for the new term. “Homeostasis” seems to fit the bill just fine, you’re just applying it to different processes/functions, that Cannon wasn’t aware of in his day.
Also, the writing is very dense with scientific terminology. But my biggest gripe about the book is that there’s little discussion about how the research that is described/discussed actually represents allostatic process(es), and/or how that process differs from homeostasis.
In all, skip it! If you’re really interested in homeostasis, read Cannon’s classic. Then, apply the concepts to other things (as Cannon does to sociology at the end of his book).
Or, just go outside and have some fun!
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