Why does any fool write a book? It can’t happen without the insistent fantasy that someone somewhere will read it, some day. Secretly, many writers keep writing under the useful delusion that, with a little luck, many people all over the world will read this book, and forever. Even modest writers hope their books will outlive them, a path to one kind of immortality. How else could books get written?
Should we treat stress?
The answer to this question, as for most complex questions, is “it depends.”
For the good and tolerable stresses of daily life, the answer is clearly “no.” By definition, we handle good and tolerable stress well enough without needing to treat it. Forget about the mythical “stress-free life": If that were even possible, it would be bad for your health.
We can be glad that evolution has given us a stress response system that automatically self-regulates the basic functions that keep us alive. Imagine every day trying to figure out your breathing patterns, your heartbeats, your digestion, your sleep, and your responses to pain and pleasure. We go through most of our lives hardly thinking about this everyday miracle of self-regulation.
Though we all talk a lot about stress, most doctors don’t measure stress and don’t know how to treat toxic stress. Even mental health specialists (psychologists, psychiatrists, and other therapists) don’t measure stress in any standard or comprehensive way. No wonder we have a hard time understanding how stress leads to illness and what we can do to change that.
We all know the feeling of growing old before our time, for a while. Some days the kids can make a young mother feel like Grandma. Some bosses and some jobs drive us into early retirement at 55 or 60. Then we feel young again and find a second career. Every president goes grey or greyer in the Oval Office. Without term limits, the better ones would die in that office.
For nine years each autumn I’ve raked the oak leaves and acorns along our walk, but until this week I never thought I’d seen an oak flower—and never wondered if oaks even had flowers. My capacity for curiosity about trees is only coming to me late in life. So this week I swept up a wheelbarrow full of flimsy yellow strands from our walk. What are these, I finally wondered?
In November 2021 a notable event in the science of heart disease passed unnoticed by the popular press. That, in itself, is not noteworthy, but then two months later the New York Times health columnist Jane Brody called our attention to the publication of a promising article in the November issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that could change the way your heart disease is treated, some day. This is a tale of promise and inertia, or the resistance to change in the practice of medicine.
For most of my thirty years in psychiatric practice I’ve worked with the occasional patient with multiple sclerosis (MS), but during the past five years the number with MS has steadily increased, and currently I regularly see at least six, most of them women. These events are my brush with what seems to be a mysterious recent rise in the rates of auto-immune disorders.
“COVID 19” could have been a cool name for a rocket or a sports car. It’s much cooler than “EBOLA” or “Swine Flu.” On February 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization, which claims exclusive naming rights for pandemics, pronounced “COVID 19” as the official name for this scourge, their marketing department had done its homework. They gave us a snappy name with a warning in it: expect another some other year.
