Monday, June 01, 2015

Two interesting articles on health

By 1973, I was suffering from stomach problems probably triggered by my mother's death in 1967. I was 32, evenings were getting longer and it seemed be time to marry and settle down. I asked the doctor I was visiting whether I was fit for marriage. He said that if I kept looking at my little finger and keep thinking that it would wither away, it would probably wither away and he said that there was nothing very wrong with me and that I could marry. I did in December 1973 and I was in Switzerland next year on a research fellowship and stayed on for ten months until the middle of 1975. That was six months longer than I expected and I ran out of the medicines I took for my stomach problems. I did not know what to do and somehow did not make the effort to see a doctor in a new country and stopped taking the medicine. But nothing happened and I did not have to take medicines for stomach problems again until ten years ago where again I took some medicine for reflux for a few months. I was reminded of those incidents while reading the following articles.
Hacking the nervous system by Gaia Vince "However the technology develops, our understanding of how the body manages disease has changed for ever. “It’s become increasingly clear that we can’t see organ systems in isolation, like we did in the past,” says Paul-Peter Tak. “We just looked at the immune system and therefore we have medicines that target the immune system.
“But it’s very clear that the human is one entity: mind and body are one. It sounds logical but it’s not how we looked at it before. We didn’t have the science to agree with what may seem intuitive. Now we have new data and new insights.”"
The truth about psychosomatic illness by Suzanne O'Sullivan. These are extracts from fer book "It’s All In Your Head"

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