Review of "The Stress Cure"

The Stress Cure offers a guide to women to solve their problems with stress, anxious depression, and other stress related health problems.  It recommends most of the standard treatments, but puts a strong emphasis on biological factors and especially promotes DHEA, the hormone dehydroepiandrosterone.  It recommends DHEA as the first step in the treatment of stress, although it does emphasize that there are many other steps women should also take, including other supplemental vitamins and minerals, meditation, exercise, and counseling. Cherewatenko is a clinician himself and so he bases the book on his own practice. 

If you do a search for DHEA on the Internet, you will find an amazing array of claims for how the medication can solve all your problems, and that should be en   ough to put you on your guard. Cherewatenko himself is much more careful and scientific in his enthusiasm for the drug, but he does claim that it has the potential for some people to help them with depression, osteoporosis, diabetes, cancer, cortisol, as well as stress. 

The book is well written and makes a plausible case.  It discusses the problems of getting a good supply of the hormone and how to take it, and it also spells out how to use it in combination with other options.  The essential question is whether its claims are true and whether people suffering from stress and depression should try it out.  To decide this, one has to know whether there is any danger associated with the hormone, how expensive it is, and whether there are other approaches which are much more effective and make it unnecessary.  I'm no expert about complementary medicine, so I am not in a position to make this judgment for other people.  However, I can say that this book has raised my interest in this hormone and I might well consider trying it for myself.  Of course, The Stress Cure is aimed at women, so I'll have to find another book to work out how best to take it.

 

© 2005 Christian Perring. All rights reserved. 

 

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.