Emotions and health part 5

some medical schools now are offering short courses in office psychiatry to their graduates .  most physicians cannot devote an hour to talk with a patients as psychiatrists do. but so long a time has been found unnecessary in treating most patients with psychogenic illness. they need, primarily, re assurance that their  ills can be dealt with.

as doctor learn to incorporate the new knowledge of psy-chogenic illness into their work, some of the responsibility, as always,  must rest with the patient . he should make an of effort to protect himself when he knows that stress has made him vulnerable. he can help the doctor by telling him when emotional upheaval has preceded or accompanied an illness. he should be completely frank about his angers and fears, his frustrations and losses. the heroic view that everything is just fine may be good manners with a friend, but it is poor judgment when it is your doctor who wants to know. 

Emotions and health part 4

   ever since a year ago, when my father died, she said mother died when i was small, and dad brought me up alone. although my husband and children give me plenty of family, without dad all the joy seems to have gone out of things.

     the doctor gave her anti depressant pills and told her to come in for a chat every few days. within a week jean’s back pain had disappeared. moreover , the talks revealed that she felt that her children had little need of her and that her husband and children, and they quickly gave her the assurance of love she needs, and the pills could  be stopped . had the back pain persisted once jean’s depression was gone, the doctor would have felt it more likely that the cause was purely physical.

        one test devised by doctors at duke university, durham, N.C., sought out unexplained fatigue, lack of sex interest, loss of weight, constipation, hopelessness, feelings of uselessness, difficulty in marketing decisions, and restlessness. all of us some time. sleep disturbance is one of the prime clues: the person with a psychogenic disorder is likely  to wake early in the morning or during the night and have a chronic feeling of fatigue.

     sudden changes in life are often found to precede illness. in one study of patients with a wide range of ailments, three out of four of were found to have recently suffered some major loss loved ones jobs homes. even apparently pleasant changes, such as a trip abroad, can cause trouble . the tourist who complains about foreign food or water would probably be wiser to blame the tension of being in a strange place, may be caused by small emotional stresses.

   are doctor other than psychiatrists really able to handle such emotional problems? numerous experience show that they are. and 

Emotions and health part 3

How can thought work such changes? There is pathway between the hypothalamus, the brain segment that controls primitive reaction to anger, fear, hunger and sex, and the pituitary gland. This mysterious gland, a lump the size of a sugar cube, located at the base of the brain, had long been known to secrete a growth hormone. But recent research has uncovered a number of other hormones it produces. The front lobe alone was found to create chemical that trigger the making of sex hormones and govern the thyroid, which in turn controls the body’s metabolism. It yields yet another chemical that reg-ulates adrenal secretion.

            

             The middle and back lobes of the pituitary affect the kidneys, contractions of the uterus, and blood pressure. We have just opened the door, says one researcher, and have had only a superficial look at this gland. But we now know one way in which emotion can be translated into bodily changes.

          With such clues to very real mechanisms, many doctors have begun to look for signs of emotional stress in patients as a matter of routine. Written tests have been designed to seek out the factors most commonly found among people whose ailments have been proved to be caused by emotion. 

      one such patient was jean becker , whose low back pain had grown steadily wores for a year , with no apparent cause. the symptoms cannot be seen on x ray. when he had scored it , he asked , have you been depressed iately?.

Emotions and health part 2

When she had rested, the doctor explained: those were some of the physical signs of great anxiety. Rapid deep breath-ing produced many such signs in any person. When we are afraid or angry, a part of the brain called the hypothalamus prepares the body for action. The heart speeds up to rush blood to our muscles. We breathe hard to fill the blood with oxygen hormones are released to bring the nervous system to a pitch of alarmed readiness. Sometimes our conscious mind, seeing no reason to be angry or afraid, may block out our awareness of anxiety .yet all the while the hypothalamus continues the alarm.

    Fran’s emotional alarm had evidently been triggered by the temporary separation from her husband.”I feel upset if anyone close leaves me,” fran admitted to the doctor.’’ when I was a child, my parents left on a trip and were both killed in an accident. When Jim left-the first time in our marriage he’s been away more than overnight-I felt real panic. I pulled myself together, but I guess the fear was still three.” Fran was given tranquilizers and saw the doctor three times to talk over her fears. The symptoms vanished in two weeks.