Wild Health: How Animals Keep Themselves Well and What We Can Learn from Them

This is a totally fascinating, wonderfully illuminating book--it's become a favorite for me. Cindy Engel is a superb writer.

This is the book I have been waiting for! Herbalists and other behavioral scientists such as nurses who have encouraged the public to look at their health behaviors will be buoyed up by Engel's research and ability to deliver the "message". This is a must for all health science collections both personal and institutional. Timely.

Cindy Engel's book is fascinating because not only does she perceive our urgent and profound new need for sustainable healthcare, she has also taken the trouble to research in depth zoological and ecological examples of animals' healthcare strategies. It is for the thoroughness of these surveys, which support a compelling argument, that we should be grateful to her.Messages from pharmaceutical-industry-led medicine have misled us for too long. Who realised, before reading Cindy Engel's book, for example, that having a temperature is the body's mechanism for combating harmful infection? Or that secondary compounds in food, some `toxic', can be deliberately ingested by animals for their protective health effects? Or that, though we know instinctively that lemon and pine are cleansing, we may not be aware that the volatile oils in those plants interfere with bacterial respiration and are commonly detrimental or repellent to arthropods and insects?Cindy Engel concludes that human beings are too much like animals in captivity in the way we have limited our own healthcare strategies. Like Native Americans, she advocates, we should observe animal behaviour as the first step to achieving sustainable healthcare.

Everyone should read this book! It's truly revolutionary and fascinating. It will change the way you think about animals and yourself. The things animals do to stay healthy are mind-boggling, and Dr. Engel is always careful to say what is scientifically proven and what isn't. I've always been suspicious of alternative medicine, but it opened my eyes.There are incredible lessons here for human health as well as animal health, and the book isn't heavy lifting at all. It's as full of ideas as Stephen Hawking and as fun to read as Dave Barry.

I loved this book. Seriously scientific but written in very accessible language. Highly topical with its relevance to mad cows, foot and mouth disease, human allergies and drug addiction. Loads of fantastic anecdotes from all sorts of animals and environments, and a style and bibliography that lets you know the author has carried out in-depth research. Constantly refers to the need for studying animals in their native habitat ... not the laboratory. Makes you aware of how new the science of animal behaviour still is, and what fascinating facts it can reveal to us.