Statin Nation

Thomas Cowan was a 20-year-old Duke grad--bright, skeptical, and already disillusioned with industrial capitalism--when he joined the Peace Corps in the mid-1970s for a two-year tour in Swaziland. There, he encountered the work of Rudolf Steiner and Weston A. Price--two men whose ideas would fascinate and challenge him for decades to come.

Both drawn to the art of healing and repelled by the way medicine was--and continues to be--practiced in the United States, Cowan returned from Swaziland, went to medical school, and established a practice in New Hampshire and, later, San Francisco. For years, as he raised his three children, suffered the setback of divorce, and struggled with a heart condition, he remained intrigued by the work of Price and Steiner and, in particular, with Steiner's provocative claim that the heart is not a pump. Determined to practice medicine in a way that promoted healing rather than compounded ailments, Cowan dedicated himself to understanding whether Steiner's claim could possibly be true. And if Steiner was correct, what, then, *is* the heart? What is its true role in the human body?

In this deeply personal, rigorous, and riveting account, Dr. Cowan offers up a daring claim: Not only was Steiner correct that the heart is not a pump, but our understanding of heart disease--with its origins in the blood vessels--is completely wrong. And this gross misunderstanding, with its attendant medications and risky surgeries, is the reason heart disease remains the most common cause of death worldwide.

In *Human Heart, Cosmic Heart* , Dr. Thomas Cowan presents a new way of understanding the body's most central organ. He offers a new look at what it means to be human and how we can best care for ourselves--and one another.