Psychosomatic disorder is a medical condition that affects the person’s mind and body. Read on to understand what it is, its symptoms, and treatment options.
A man loses the power of his legs but tests suggest he is perfectly fit. Could he be imagining it? In this extract from her new book, the neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan lifts the lid on psychosomatic illness
Psychosomatic disorder is a medical condition that affects the person’s mind and body. Read on to understand what it is, its symptoms, and treatment options.
Psychosomatic disorder is a medical condition that affects the person’s mind and body. Read on to understand what it is, its symptoms, and treatment options.
This remarkable study uses case histories to show the extent and gravity of a much misunderstood condition
We've all wondered whether an ache or pain could be the sign of something more sinister. For most of us it's a fleeting worry, quickly forgotten when the symptom disappears. For hypochondriacs, however, that sense of anxiety never goes away. Then there's psychosomatic illness: when people unconsciously think themselves ill. Olivia Willis and Lynne Malcolm report.
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In our Breathe Easier with Asthma program we work with the participants to release the emotional root cause that is contributing to the asthma condition
Dr. John Sarno's book "The MindBody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain" is invaluable and is one of two books by Dr. Sarno that should be required reading for all medical school and PA school students, as well as all practicing medical providers. Dr. Sarno has written a gripping and extraordinarily truthful account of psychosomatic back
A trailblazing, conversation-starting history of women's health--from the earliest medical ideas about women's illnesses to hormones and autoimmune diseases--brought together in a fascinating sweeping narrative. Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman ten years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As Elinor learned to live with her unpredictable disease she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis. In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn traces the almost unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women by treating their bodies as alien and other, often to perilous effect. The result is an authoritative and groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between women and medical practice, from the "wandering womb" of Ancient Greece to the rise of witch trials across Europe, and from the dawn of hysteria as a catchall for difficult-to-diagnose disorders to the first forays into autoimmunity and the shifting understanding of hormones, menstruation, menopause, and conditions like endometriosis. Packed with character studies and case histories of women who have suffered, challenged, and rewritten medical orthodoxy--and the men who controlled their fate--this is a revolutionary examination of the relationship between women, illness, and medicine. With these case histories, Elinor pays homage to the women who suffered so strides could be made, and shows how being unwell has become normalized in society and culture, where women have long been distrusted as reliable narrators of their own bodies and pain. But the time for real change is long overdue: answers reside in the body, in the testimonies of unwell women--and their lives depend on medicine learning to listen. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780593182970 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group Publication Date: 06-07-2022 Pages: 400 Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)About the Author Elinor Cleghorn has a background in feminist culture and history, and her critical writing has been published in several academic journals, including Screen. After receiving her PhD in humanities and cultural studies in 2012, Elinor worked for three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford on an interdisciplinary arts and medical humanities project. She has given talks and lectures at the British Film Institute, where she has been a regular contributor to the education program, Tate Modern, and ICA London, and she has appeared on the BBC Radio 4 discussion show The Forum. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and she has since written creatively about her experience of chronic illness for publications including Ache (UK) and Westerly (AUS). She now works as a freelance writer and researcher and lives in Sussex.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt 1. Wandering Wombs On the Greek island of Kos many centuries ago, a girl was taken ill. At first, she felt strangely weak, her chest heavy and tight. Soon she began to shiver with fever; pain gripped her heart; terrifying hallucinations swarmed her mind. She was found wandering the streets, so consumed by heat and hurt that she wanted to end her life. Throwing herself down a well or hanging from a tree by a noose would have been pleasant compared with the torment that wracked her body and mind. Her father called for the physician-a man trained in the arts of healing. The physician had seen this illness before in girls who had started to menstruate but hadn't yet married. As they developed into puberty, their plentiful female blood had been used up by growing. Once they had grown into women, all that extra blood accumulated in their wombs, ready to spill out every month. All physicians knew that this was how the female body stayed healthy. This girl was drowning in her own blood. It had no way to flow out, so it had traveled from her womb back through her veins, inflaming her heart and poisoning her senses. The physician urged the girl's father to marry her off without delay. Intercourse would open her body so that her blood would flow out, and pregnancy would make her healthy. In another home on the island, an older married woman was seized by a violent convulsion. Her eyes rolled back, she ground her teeth, and saliva foamed in her mouth. Her skin was deathly cold; her abdomen wrenched with pain. Her husband called for the physician. This malady often befell women of her age who had stopped having sex and bearing children. He watched the woman writhe and sob and noted that her skin was clammy. The woman's womb, empty and dry because it wasn't being filled, had crept toward her liver in search of moisture. From there it had blocked her diaphragm and robbed her of breath. The woman was being suffocated by her own womb. Soon, the physician hoped, phlegm would flow from her head to moisten her womb and weigh it down. The physician listened to the woman's belly for the gurgling sounds of the womb returning to its rightful place. If it lingered too long near her liver, she would choke to death. If only she had been having sex regularly, she might have been spared this misery. Women like this haunt The Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of medical discourse attributed to Hippocrates of Kos, the Greek physician known as the father of medicine, from the Classical era-the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. As a teacher and physician, Hippocrates revolutionized medicine. He debunked centuries-old superstitions that diseases were punishments doled out by vengeful gods. He taught that ill health arose from imbalances in the body, and he invented the patient case study, writing careful notes about the symptoms and course of a person's illness and prescribing herbal recipes as treatments. He vowed to treat all illness, in all people, to the best of his ability and to never abuse the body of any man or woman. Whether his patient was freeborn or enslaved, he promised to do no harm: Hippocrates's oath became the cornerstone of patient ethics, and it is still sworn by medical graduates today. Hippocrates emphasized how women's bodies and illnesses needed to be dealt with very differently from those of men. He stressed how important it was for physicians to "learn correctly from a patient the origin of her disease" by questioning her "immediately and in detail about the cause." Many women, he remarked, suffered and died because physicians proceeded to treat their diseases like "diseases in men." But even though he acknowledged that the diseases of women required special and specific approaches to healing, Hippocrates was not exactly championing women's right to body autonomy and informed medical choice. The Hippocratic Corpus was written at a time when most women had few, if any, civil or human rights. In the patriarchal social order of ancient Greece, girls were the property of their fathers, and women of their husbands. They had no ownership over land, property, money, or even their own bodies. They were seen as weaker, slower, smaller versions of the male human ideal, deficient and defective precisely because of their difference to men. But in their difference, women possessed the most useful and mysterious organ of all: the uterus. Since women's sole purpose was thought to be to bear and raise children, their health was entirely defined by the uterus. Medical ideas reflected and legitimized society's control over the female body and its precious procreative power. Right at the very beginnings of Western medical history, in writings that would become the foundations of scientific medical discourse and practice, unwell women emerged as a mass of pathological wombs. The Hippocratic Corpus was based on the teachings of Hippocrates, but it was actually written down by different physicians who followed him. In treatises like Diseases of Women, Nature of Women, and Diseases of Young Girls, Hippocratic physicians described many different symptoms that afflicted women, from puberty and the beginnings of menstruation to conception, pregnancy, and menopause. The idea that all women's diseases were related to their reproductive functions seems, today, like the worst kind of misogynistic conspiracy. But in ancient Greece, where women's entire social existence was defined by their uteruses, it made perfect sense that the disorders and dysfunctions of their bodies and minds would be too. And the Hippocratics didn't have much else to go on. Human dissection was prohibited, so they had no knowledge about where organs were precisely located, how blood circulated, or how respiration occurred. They didn't know about cells, hormones, or neurons. Their understanding of female physiology decreed that women's bodies were overly wet because they had too much blood. They came to this conclusion because women menstruate. Physicians could interpret what was making a woman ill only through what they could see and feel. Limited knowledge and prevailing social attitudes led to a concoction of theories about the influence of the uterus on every aspect of women's health. Sometimes it was diseased; other times it caused diseases in different parts of the body, including the mind. It was both a channel and a vessel, and a woman was kept healthy if it was either releasing moisture or being filled with it. The cure for Hippocratic uterine pathologies, from the madness of suppressed menstruation to the horrors of womb suffocation, was as much social as it was medical: marriage, ideally by the age of fourteen, regular sex with one's husband-who was usually around the age of thirty-and multiple pregnancies. "I assert that a woman who has not borne children becomes ill from her menses more seriously and sooner than one who has borne children," wrote the author of the first tract of Diseases of Women. Fo
You can. But it helps to think well of yourself in the first place
Bestel hier Anna O van Matthew Blake. THE WORLD WILL KNOW HER NAME What if your nightmares weren’t really nightmares at all? We spend an average of thirty-three years of our lives asleep. But what really happens, and what are we capable of, when we are sleeping? Anna Ogilvy was a budding twenty-five-year-old writer with a bright future. Then, one night, she stabbed two people to death with no apparent motive—and she hasn’t woken up since. Dubbed “Sleeping Beauty” by the tabloids, Anna suffers from a rare psychosomatic disorder known to neurologists as “resignation syndrome.” Dr. Benedict Prince is a forensic psychologist and an expert in the field of sleep-related homicides. His methods represent the last possible hope of solving the infamous “Anna O” case by waking Anna up so she can stand trial. But the doctor must be careful treating such a high-profile suspect—he’s got career secrets and a complicated personal life of his own. As Anna shows the first signs of stirring, Benedict knows he must determine what really happened and whether Anna should be held responsible for her crimes. Only Anna knows the truth about that night, but only Benedict knows how to discover it. And they’re both in danger from what they will discover.
Subtle alterations of a hormonal stress response system called the HPA axis may play a role in chronic fatigue syndrome, according to a study in the November/December issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.
IMAGINE HAVING A CONDITION with symptoms so severe that you can’t leave the house, yet your doctor calls it a “functional,” or “psychosomatic,” disease — meaning that it’s all in […]
HOW CAN YOU, IN a week or less, get dramatic relief from all the symptoms you thought you had to live with the rest of your life? I’ll get to […]
Nelly Agassi -- from Palace of Tears, 2001
How can I experience psychosomatic healing? Find out how a course in psychosomatic therapy can change your perspective of yourself and everyone around you by learning to read body-mind communication.
Turner syndrome chromosomal condition describes women and girls with features caused by a partial or complete absence of second sex chromosome
lucifelle: “ Polarity Therapy Charts 1-10 “The Wireless Anatomy of Man" Its neat to see this in chart form as we bring these concepts to life during massage. ”
