Bruce Carlson - Your Aging Body - Teaser

and how to care for it

Nonfiction / Aging / Self-Help

Date Published: 06-12-2025

Publisher: The Woodtick Press

Written in understandable language, this book describes the ways in which our body changes with age and outlines some practical ways to counter many of these changes. It begins by discussing the aging process in general terms and why some people seem much younger than others of the same chronological age. After a presentation of general characteristics of the aging body, subsequent chapters focus on what lies behind the aging of specific parts of the body and how the reader can counteract or slow down the aging process through lifestyle changes. The text illustrates how some seemingly quite different aging changes, for example skin wrinkles and high blood pressure, are due to very similar underlying mechanisms. Although not focusing on disease, the book deals with a number of conditions, e.g., hypertension, arthritis, Type II diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, which affect many older adults. A concluding chapter pulls together many of the details presented earlier in the book and offers some practical advice for navigating the aging process.

As both a professional anatomist and a gerontologist, the author is well qualified to write a book on the aging body. Forty years as a professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, he served as Chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology and also Director of the Institute of Gerontology. For several decades he conducted research on the aging of muscle. He is a past-president of the American Association of Anatomists and of the Association of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Neurobiology Chairpersons.

Excerpt

How Do We Keep Our Balance?

Our body is never completely stable. Even while standing still, our body sways ever so slightly. Usually we don't even notice it. The main reason is that we constantly make tiny un-noticed corrections to our stance that keep our body in a stable upright condition. If we are walking and our foot hits a snag of some sort, one of our legs automatically kicks out and our arms spread to counteract the forward lurching of our body. If we are lucky, that action is enough to correct the stumble and we continue walking. If we are unlucky, we fall.

Keeping our balance involves a complex dance among several systems in our body. Most important are 1) a component of our inner ear, called the vestibular system; 2) our visual system; and 3) a large batch of sensory nerves that make up what is called the proprioceptive system. These three systems all send messages to the brain, which sorts them out and then sends appropriate messages to a variety of muscles throughout the body, telling them to adjust their individual contractions in a manner that keeps our body in a stable position.

Author Share Link

Bruce Carlson has had a long and varied career in a number of fields. As an undergraduate student at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, he majored in biology, languages and chemistry. As a prelude to becoming a fish biologist, he worked for the Minnesota Conservation Department (now DNR) as an aquatic biologist during summers except for one when he conducted research at the University of Georgia Marine Laboratory on Sapelo Island, Georgia. He entered a program in ichthyology at Cornell University, but became fascinated with the phenomenon of regeneration. After receiving an MS from Cornell, he entered the MD-PhD program at the University of Minnesota where he conducted research on limb regeneration in salamanders.

In 1966 he joined the faculty of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Michigan Medical School and became Chairman of the Department and later, Director of the Institute of Gerontology. He taught microscopic anatomy and human embryology and received several major awards for his teaching. His research on regeneration, embryology and muscle biology led him to live for extended periods in five countries – The USSR, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Finland and New Zealand. A prolific writer, he has written over 200 articles and chapters in scientific publications, has edited 15 symposium articles and translations, and he has written twenty books on a variety of topics.

Bruce is an avid fisherman, who is on the water well over 100 days per year, either night-fishing for walleyes or fly fishing for smallmouth bass in northern Minnesota. He has also taken many trips to New Zealand, his favorite country, to fish for trout in a remote lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains. For many years he wrote articles for several national fishing magazines. The main theme was that the more you understand the biology of the fish you are trying tocatch, the better will be your results.

Since retirement in 2006, Bruce has reverted to his scientific childhood and has again taken up work on fish and lake biology. In addition to weekly collections of data about the lake by his cabin, he has directed a ten-year study on the growth of northern pike on a nearby lake and has spent hundreds of hours taking underwater videos in northern lakes. This activity has led to his writing two popular books on lake biology and one on aquatic invasive species.

In addition to his outdoor work, Bruce has maintained an active professional writing schedule, with seven editions of his book “Human Embryology and Developmental Biology” and other books on regeneration, the human body and muscle biology. His work in the area of embryology has led him into expert witness work in that area and writing a new book on the abortion controversy – “The Abortion Controversy – An Embryologist’s Perspective.” His background in anatomy and the biology of aging has him thinking about writing a new book on understanding the aging body.

Contact Links

Website: https://woodtickpress.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bluecottagebooks

Blog: https://woodtickpress.com/blog/

Purcahse Links

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Your-Aging-Body-How-Care-ebook/dp/B0FD9C7HG1

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