Anxiety and illness
Media
Part of Panorama
- Title
- Anxiety and illness
- Creator
- Gray, G. W.
- Language
- English
- Year
- 1965
- Rights
-
- Abstract
- Fear, nerves, tension have been known to affect health and vigor.
- Fulltext
- ■ Fear, nerves, tension have been known to affect health and vigor. ANXIETY AND ILLNESS He came into the hospital one Monday: a man whose arms were pimpled with a bothersome skin disease. “Almost every Monday I have a breaking out like this,” he said. “What do you do on Sun days?” asked the doctor. Usually, said the patient, he visited a young lady. It developed that for some years the couple had been engaged, but the woman re peatedly postponed naming the wedding day. Each Sun day the man pressed for a decision; each Monday was the* day . after a frustration. And “almost every Monday” his skin protested his an xious state by breaking into eczema. To the same big eastern hospital came a man critic ally ill with asthma. After weeks of treatment he was relieved, and a day set for his discharge. Suddenly, on the night before his sche duled departure, all his former dangerous symptoms returned. Treatment was resumed; again his breath ing became free; again ar rangements were made for the journey. And again asth ma returned in full force. The record showed that this patient was a college teacher who had become em broiled in a faculty fight and feared for'his job. Here was a situation of uncertain ty such that it seemed bet ter to remain within the protecting walls of the hos pital than to go back to the scene of former strife and face the likelihood of dis missal. Obviously in these cases there was more than the physical condition; there was also a mental or emotional disturbance which had its counterpart in the physical mechanism. Medical men have long called certain ill-understood September 1965 51 symptoms “functional,” there by segregating them from “organic” diseases in which the ailing organs show ana tomical defects. A head ache that can be correlated with a brain tumor is an organic disturbance, but a headache that plagues its vic tim without traceable con nection to any structural fault is “merely functional.” Many a blaffled doctor dis poses of “functional” cases with the pronouncement, “You only imagine you are sick. Quit worrying, go home and forget it.” Such advice rarely is ef fective. And labeling such cases “psychoneurosis” does not dispose of the patients, who drift from one doctor to another, eventually per haps to a faith healer, and some night may show up at a testimonial meeting, cured. On the other hand, the neurotic may chance to ap ply to a physician who con siders the patient as a whole. The old-time family physi cian was often of this school, and Dr. S. Weir Mitchell was a shining practitioner of its art in the 19th century. Scientifically trained doctors practicing it today, while growing in number, are still few. It is only within re cent years that study of the emotions as factors in illness has received serious attention in medical schools and re search centers, and it is be ing discovered that in a wide range of disease emotional states show themselves to be a complicating, often a con trolling, influence. In 1934 Dr. Flanders Dun bar and her associates at the Presbyterian Hospital in New York began investigat ing possible emotional factors in two widely different kinds of diseases, both generally related to organic impair ment: diabetes and diseases of the heart. In each group emotional factors were found to affect more than half of the patients. In times of emotional disturbance the diabetes was worse and the cardiac symptoms intensified. There is increasing evid ence that pent-up, repressed anxiety which cannot be dis charged in action is discharg ed in the form of disease. In many cases of high blood pressure no organic cause can be traced. And even when there is a definite or ganic cause, the patient of 52 Panorama ten responds directly to im provement in his emotional state. Dr. Erwin Moos reports the case of a man with a systolic blood pressure of 280, who was also afflicted with a lung disorder, and whose urine showed traces of albumen. Rest and drugs brought no beneficial effect, but one day the patient re marked that he had done great wrong to his estranged wife. The doctor immediate ly arranged a meeting, and after a friendly discussion between the two, the man’s blood pressure fell te 150, his lung symptoms abated, and the albumen disappear ed. Several years later the patient was in good health with a blood pressure of only 130: The whole physiology of anxiety is bound up with the idea of protection, and has its origins far back in human history. How to save one’s skin was a supreme problem of primitive man. Every day there was the necessity of taking strong action either in fighting or fleeing. These demands gradually built into the body an automatic scheme of swift adjustment for action. In time of fear or anger powerful changes go on within the body: the heart muscles are stimulated to more rapid pulsations, circu lation is shifted from the stomach and intestines to the heart, brain, lungs, and ske letal muscles — all resources are mobilized for most ef fective fight or flight. The mechanisms of these auto matic reactions are largely chemical — caused by power ful substances secreted by the glands and the nerve endings. And every impres sion from the outside world that threatens the security of the individual, that provokes him to anger or inspires him to fear, automatically calls into play, this complicated biochemical mechanism to prepare the body for action. Now the man who has just lost his fortune in a bank failure suffers a fear just as real as was the fear of a cave man confronted by a wild beast. However, whether the cave man ran, or stood and fought, he needed the stronger heart beat, the change in blood September 1965 53 distribution. But to the vic tim of the bankruptcy these adjustments are superfluous. They prepare him for action which does not take place. They glut his system with powerful substances he does not need, and which cause internal conflict. Such con flicts tend to be suppressed, but the fact that they are unconscious does not mean they are innocuous. Quite the opposite. The poison ing effect of a source of anxiety seems to increase in inverse ratio to the victim’s awareness of its identity. — G. W. Gray,, from Harpers. THE HUMANITY IN ME What I call my character or nature is made up of infinite particles of inherited tendencies from my ancestors — those whose blood runs in my veins. A little seed of laziness from this grandfather and of prodigality from that. Some remote grand mother perhaps, has stamped me with a fear of horses or a love of dogs. There may be in me a bit of outlawry from some pirate forefather, and a dash of piety from one who was a saint. Religion is not a personal affair so much as it is communal. You are a Jew because you were born a JeW; for the same reason you are a Catholic, you are a Presbyterian, you a Buddhist, you a Mormon. As we enter life we find these cells already made in the human beehive and crawl into them. Original ideas? Where will I find them? All the ideas there are exist now, floating in the human sea. I, an oyster, absorb a few, and call them mine. Even the phrases of the Lord’s Prayer have been traced to Talmudic sources.... Let us, therefore, put away coarse egotisms and partisan passions, and learn to love humanity, to think and feel in terms of humanity. — From Four Minute Essays, by Dr. Frank Crane. 54 Panorama