The Boiled Frog Syndrome : Your Health and the Built Environment

The last century saw a dramatic increase in urban-related illnesses. Poor office design, glaring lights and bad ventilation, gave rise to the condition "Sick Building Syndrome", and heavily polluted, built-up environments, resulted in the growth of allergies and asthma.
The aptly titled Boiled Frog Syndrome presents a vital, urban survival guide, offering solutions and remedies to our inner-city malaise.
This volume is an essential guide for architects and urban planners. The book offers innovative design solutions to combat the negative effects on occupants' health, enabling the architect to design and build healthier and stress-free urban environments.

A frog jumps into a pot of water which is gradually being heated. As the water gets warmer, the frog adjusts its body temperature and continues to adjust to the increasing water temperature until, ultimately, the frog is boiled alive.

Like the frog, we keep adjusting and reacting to the increasing health and ecological hazards to satisfy our expectations and demands for more comforts, greater convenience and easier living. Despite our Western materialism, few people seem to be satisfied and content.

The Boiled Frog Syndrome presents compelling evidence to show that the source of the majority of the Western diseases of civilisation that have multiplied over the past 100 years, ranging from cancers to debilitating sicknesses and allergies, can be traced to the modern built environment, our increasing exposure to electromagnetic radiation and the indiscriminate use of untested advanced technology. It is also due, in part, to the 20th century's repudiation of perennial wisdom.

Our physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing will depend on our endeavours to bring about fundamental changes to combat the hazards. But how can this be done? And what can we - the so-called ordinary people - do about it? The text explores how our subtle energy sensitivities respond to the external environment and suggests the steps we can take to ensure our homes and workplaces are safe and conducive to our continued good health. For this it draws on common sense and the author's personal experience as a practising architect and consultant. It is also based on the wisdom and teachings of the past, gleaned from those who knew how to create a healthy, harmonious environment.

This book provides the reader with the 'ammunition' to challenge the attitudes of the practitioners and their teaching institutions who are engaged in the built environment.

"A tour de force. This book is both visionary and immensely practical, giving advice from which we can all benefit." David Lorimer, Project Director, Scientific and Medical Network

"This book demands attention from first to last page, and will undoubtedly prove to be a formative and informative influence on every reader." Roger Coghill, Director, Coghill Research Laboratories

"Thomas Saunders' book could not come at a more relevant moment when events remind us that we must have respect for the environment in which we live - otherwise we will cease to live. A complex, fascinating, always open-minded attempt to show us how to challenge the Establishment." Maureen Lipman, actress

"An eye-opening, life-enhancing book." Neville Hodgkinson, formerly medical and science correspondent to The Sunday Times

"A fascinating book. Whatever your views, prejudices or assumptions, Thomas Saunders brings new perspectives to important global environmental and design issues affecting the future of our planet." Robert Rowland, former Editor of the BBC's 'Money Programme' and 'Panorama' and Head of BBC Open University Production Centre

"Thomas Saunders' fascinating new book offers us all a wake-up call for the way we are living our lives. He convinces us that we can play a part, however small, in changing both our personal and global environments. The Boiled Frog Syndrome is a book that can truly make a difference." Les Dennis, entertainer

"Thomas Saunders effectively links the seemingly mutually exclusive worlds of ancient arts and skills, modern sciences, humanity and design to weave a compelling story that makes these arcane subjects accessible to all. This book is suitable for general reading and should also become a standard text for architecture and design students and other professionals. After reading The Boiled Frog Syndrome we will never look at the world in the same way again." Peter Ullathorne, JP RIBA AADipl. FRSA AAIA, Vice President, HOK International, London