Functional Endocrinology [antikvár]

PREFACE This book is written for practitioners, students and investigators of medicine and surgery who seek practical information concerning (a) the actions of endocrine systems in health and ordinary disease and (b) the management of endocrinopathies as they occur in young people. As much emphasis has been given the former as the latter subjects in the belief that endocrinology encompasses more than the diagnosis and therapy of those gross disorders of glandular function which result in gigantism, dwarfism, Addison's disease, Graves' disease, sexual precocity and the like. The physician may encounter but a handful of patients suffering from these unusual conditions in all his years of practice. Yet he constantly deals with patients whose health or survival depends to no small extent upon the homeostatic efficiency of certain endocrine-controlled systems. Just as we have learned that there is hardly an organ or tissue in the body beyond the influence of endocrine forces, so we are beginning to realize that there is scarcely a disease that is unaccompanied by important homeostatic changes in the functional activity of one or more of the endocrine glands. This book therefore attempts to translate into modern clinical terms the thesis so beautifully expressed by "Walter B. Cannon in his classic writings on The Wisdom of the Body. Detailed consideration has been given in separate chapters to all those glands now known to be organs of internal secretion. Certain strucmres such as the pineal body and the thymus, organs once considered by many to belong to the endocrine family, are not so discussed. It appears that most if not all of the effects once attributed to these structures as endocrine organs can now be explained more satisfactorily by other means. Obesity also is not considered in a separate chapter, though discussion of this condition will be found to occupy a considerable amount of space in the text. This seems a logical decision in view of the fact that the vast majority of obese patients lack any objectively demonstrable endocrine disorder. There is one chapter which we would have included