Articles categorized under “Health and Wellness” unfortunately cannot receive comments. I so wanted to leave a comment on David A. Reinstein’s article, Psychosomatic Conditions: The Pain is Real, that I decided to write a responding article.
I agree with his article wholeheartedly. Psychosomatic conditions may be caused by a mental trigger, but the resulting symptom is still very physical. Ever seen the movie Lawnmower Man? Jeff Fahey’s character reads about how people had been reported as causing boils to appear on their skin just by thinking about it. Curious, he tries it himself and with startling results. While this is of course, an extreme example, I do believe that similar situations are possible.
The mind is an extraordinary thing that we have yet to fully understand. It is connected with every part of your body through a complex system of nerves. Why is it then, so hard to understand that particularly strong thoughts from the brain could cause a part or parts of the body to react in one way or another? Doesn’t it make sense that the brain would be able to initiate the message of pain through the nerves even if there is no 3rd party physical source triggering it? We are not talking about psychic powers where the brain has control over objects or forces outside of the body. This is pure science.
I know for a fact that when I have felt severely depressed I got real waves of pain that started from my body core and emanated out to my extremities. There was no physical trigger for this, I was not inducing the pain in any manner other than the emotional distress I felt. Therefore it is completely logical to me that people could cause other physical symptoms in addition to nerve pain simply by their thoughts or emotions.