Scientists Put Shamanic Medicine Under The Microscope

[wild_one353]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/shaman-medicine-autoimmune-disease_55f8737be4b0d6492d633c23

 

[JMC]

An interesting article on some levels, but Crohn's is not an autoimmune disease and the fact that the author does not know this tends to discredit it in my view.

Comments like this also make my blood boil:

In his 2003 book on the link between stress and sickness, When The Body Says No, the Canadian physician Dr. Gabor Maté writes that in nearly every autoimmune patient he has worked with, "underlying emotional repression was an ever-present factor."

Indeed, a growing body of research has found that stress, childhood trauma, anxiety and other psychosocial factors can play a role in the development of autoimmunity. One study found that patients with rheumatoid arthritis often report having experienced emotional neglect and abuse in childhood, while another found that MS patients exhibit "insecurity that drives their need to seek greater love." Similarly, lupus patients frequently report histories of childhood emotional deprivation.

I strongly believe cause and effect are pointing in the wrong direction here, deterioration in physical health is leading to mental health issues and not the other way round. Articles like this just perpetuate the nonsense that "it's all in your head".

 

[wild_one353]

An interesting article on some levels, but Crohn's is not an autoimmune disease and the fact that the author does not know this tends to discredit it in my view.

Comments like this also make my blood boil:

In his 2003 book on the link between stress and sickness, When The Body Says No, the Canadian physician Dr. Gabor Maté writes that in nearly every autoimmune patient he has worked with, "underlying emotional repression was an ever-present factor."

Indeed, a growing body of research has found that stress, childhood trauma, anxiety and other psychosocial factors can play a role in the development of autoimmunity. One study found that patients with rheumatoid arthritis often report having experienced emotional neglect and abuse in childhood, while another found that MS patients exhibit "insecurity that drives their need to seek greater love." Similarly, lupus patients frequently report histories of childhood emotional deprivation.

I strongly believe cause and effect are pointing in the wrong direction here, deterioration in physical health is leading to mental health issues and not the other way round. Articles like this just perpetuate the nonsense that "it's all in your head".

Seems slightly off topic, but its interesting to me and i have thought of all this before. When your brain/body is working properly, you can think of a solution to your issues quickly,your memory is good and you are creative and you experience less stress for shorter amounts of time. When your brain fails to do these things well, you experience higher stress levels. These relationships between autoimmunity and reduced quality of psychological subjective experiance, is somewhat due to the process I attempted to just model. So I don't entirely agree that this concept which I believe is called downward causation, has any significance in IBD, although from certain experiments do weakly suggest stress may affect some disease processes, the effect is very weak. From whati recall there is a physical connection between the brain and the gut i dont recall precisely what this is but surprisingly 80% of the signals traveling down the vagus nerve are coming from the gut to the brain, and not the other way around, it seems the bacteria in our gut may have much more control over how we percieve the world then we think. Im not aware of any other more precise physical connection between the gut and the brain though or stress causing gi inflammation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downward_causation

Underlying emotional repression sounds almost like he's describing anxiety.

Here's an article that discusses a similar topic.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3626880/