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Psychosomatic Symptoms

sick“Maybe this is all from anxiety.”

“You think?  I mean, yeah, I am anxious, but it feels more like it’s from the symptom than causing the symptom.”

“Still.”

My colleague and friend—and physician—and I were discussing the sudden onset of intense nausea I’d started to experience roughly three weeks after I’d been released from the hospital, as I detailed in a previous post, Overcoming The Fear Of Death.  After a pulmonary embolus I’d been left dealing with a clostridium difficile infection, for which I was taking Flagyl, a drug known to cause nausea.  The only problem with concluding that the drug was the cause of mine was that I’d been on it nausea-free for a full week already, not to mention I’d been on it previously without nausea for a full course the first time we’d treated the clostridium difficile infection (I’d relapsed, as commonly happens).  Why after a previous full course and then seven days would it suddenly cause this side effect? Continue reading…

The Danger Of Having Unrealistic Expectations

screamMy wife and I vividly remember the anesthesiologist’s statement: “You may feel a little pressure.” She spoke the word gently, as if to imply that’s how it would feel, and we believed her.  Epidural blocks, she explained, don’t numb the sacral nerve roots that deliver sensation from the pelvic floor so my wife would likely feel something as she entered the last stage of labor and our son began passing through her birth canal.  But we were both reassured. A mild bit of pressure seemed no threat to our hope of having the same experience my sister-in-law had with her first child: she’d had to be told when to push at the final moments because she couldn’t feel anything at all. Continue reading…

The Critical Importance Of Sleep

sleepMost people who come to see me complaining of fatigue are worried something is wrong with them physically but turn out only to be sleep deprived.  Sleep seems to be something we all wish we did more, making us for the most part a chronically and persistently sleep-deprived society.  Though studies suggest large differences exist in how much sleep different people need to function normally, the range varying from less than 6 to more than 9 hours, and that short sleepers and long sleepers run in families (suggesting a genetic component for people operating on the extremes of the sleep curve), other studies suggest as many as 33% of us don’t get enough sleep to satisfy our basal sleep need (the amount of sleep needed on a nightly basis to perform optimally). Continue reading…

How World Peace Is Possible

peace

Photo: Jayel Aheram

When I was in grammar school learning about World War II, I remember thinking how grateful I was that society had finally matured to the point in the intervening years that war no longer ever broke out.   Today I can hardly remember what bizarre thought process led me to conclude that people had actually become less barbaric with time.  I do remember I also believed racial prejudice had died out decades ago and that the pronouncement of guilt or innocence by our justice system reflected actual guilt or innocence. Continue reading…