Hormone Sourcebook : How Hormones Dominate Your Life from Before Birth Through Old Age

The book idea came from over 45 years of research, and teaching students training for careers in the health sciences, including medicine, dentistry, nursing, physical therapy and exercise science. This experience and feedback at dinner parties led him to decide that people are remarkably uninformed, yet are intensely curious, about how their bodies work, especially about what hormones do.

The hormone topics are introduced systematically and discussed in conversational style. The ten chapters are loaded with topical information, explanations of hormone controversies, and stories of epochal breakthroughs in bio-medicine (including hormone-related work by 30 Nobel Prize winners). The book provides the basics for understanding news stories about hormones that appear almost daily, and information that better prepares one for trips to the doctor. The book also guides readers through such controversies as hormone replacement therapy in menopause, steroid abuse and its consequences, the "bio-identical" hormones flap, and the nature-nurture arguments about the causes of homosexuality.

The author has a Ph.D, degree from UCLA inendocrine physiology, and took advanced study at the University of London as Squibb Fellow of the Endocrine Society. He is Professor Emeritus of Biology and of Exercise Science, University of Iowa, and has held visiting professorships in endocrinology at the American Medical Association's Institute for Biomedical Research, and in physiology at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. Dr. Spaziani has published over seventy research articles and reviews on hormonal systems in leading national and international scientific journals. His scientific work was supported by The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.