
Some unexplained physical symptoms may be caused by unresolved emotional trauma - adriand
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/article-their-pain-is-real-and-for-patients-with-mystery-illnesses-help-is/
======
tomhoward
I’ve been testing this hypothesis - as best as one possibly can without
conventional medical support - for the past few years.

I’ve found that with persistence, emotion-based therapies are effective at
bringing about healing of chronic physiological illnesses.

Prior to that I’d spent several frustrating years seeking diagnosis for
conditions that were debilitating but not apparently identifiable or
treatable.

To me they manifested as chronic muscle and joint pain, digestive issues,
fatigue/lethargy, skin conditions, signs of inflammation. Medical tests found
only mild deficiencies of Vitamin D and iron, with recommendations to treat
with diet or supplements but otherwise nothing wrong. Yet the pain and fatigue
was debilitating and made it impossible to live a normal life.

In desperation I turned to unconventional therapies and came across a set of
techniques that seek to identify and resolve traumas/complexes/phobias stuck
in the subconscious mind.

I’ve been undertaking these practices consistently for about 6-7 years now,
and slowly but surely my symptoms are subsiding and all aspects of my life are
improving.

Why does has it taken so long?

It turns out there was a huge amount of emotional baggage to work through. Not
obvious stuff like childhood abuse; just a lot of unpleasant experiences that
began from being an anxious child, and snowballed as life progressed.

I’ve now worked through several thousand instances of trauma from throughout
my life. Much of it is minor or seemingly trivial, and some of it is profound,
but it all seems to play a role, and the process of
identifying/understanding/resolving it is directly correlated with the
alleviation of my symptoms.

I’m now quite certain that this concept would have a huge impact on the
medical world if it were to be embraced by the mainstream, but there’s huge
resistance to it so it seems set to remain confined to the fringes for a long
time to come.

Recently there's been coverage (on HN [1] and elsewhere [2]) of Dr. Gabor
Maté, a veteran physician who has studied the role of trauma in addiction and
chronic illness. He advocates the position that there is near enough to a
perfect correlation between chronic illness or addiction and trauma. From my
own experience and from what I've observed in other people I know, this rings
true.

I'm not sure what it will take for this notion to be embraced more widely and
researched more deeply, but it seems pretty important.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497985)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUGGNPAK6uw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUGGNPAK6uw)

~~~
afpx
I had a lot of trauma as a child, and it left me with an enlarged and overly-
connected amygdala. If I was living 10,000 years ago, this wouldn’t be so bad.
It would just result in an over-active fight/flight response. However, in the
modern day, it results in an ‘always-on’ stress response which saturates my
body with stress hormones. And, the stress hormones cause lots of other health
issues, and it becomes a cycle of chronic conditions.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, one can’t decrease the size or connectivity
of the amygdala. So, one thing to do is to strengthen the executive
controlling function of the prefrontal cortex. Some people recommend
meditation training and mindfulness for this. And, it’s helpful sometimes.
Another theory is to participate in activites that cause other hormones to
counteract cortisol, etc. Unfortunately, those types of experiences (e.g.
having a solid and broad community of support) are even more difficult in the
modern world. So, the only long-term solution that I know of is to remove
oneself from stress completely - which is also practically impossible.

~~~
RandomInteger4
How did you find out about the size of your amygdala?

~~~
afpx
MRI. Isn’t that the only way?

~~~
RandomInteger4
Oh yeah, I was more referring to the string of events that led to the
realization that you might need a brain scan vs. just being prescribed
something. I imagine there is an interesting story to be told here regarding
your experiences with the medical system leading up to that point?

I don't mean to prod too much; just curious.

------
Someone1234
Just want to say that for tens of years Multiple Sclerosis was considered a
mental health disorder, and Crohn's Disease continues to be commonly
misdiagnosed. And while this team's results speak for themselves in certain
cases, I'd be interested to hear about the patients who it isn't effective for
and where they're left after.

The medical field has to deal with a lot of Somatoform Disorders (or similar
mental issues), but the problem is that once you have a hammer everything
looks like a nail. So if it is an uncommon diagnosis and symptoms aren't easy
to demonstrate, people often get thrown into that category (or worse a note on
medical records stops new doctors considering additional options).

I'm actually extremely enthused about this therapy. My questions more relate
around: If it is tried and fails, are the doctors going to consider OTHER
medical explanations or just give up, pushing it into the "mental health"
catch-all?

~~~
phkahler
>> And while this team's results speak for themselves in certain cases, I'd be
interested to hear about the patients who it isn't effective for and where
they're left after.

The others are left out in the cold.

~~~
faoijef984jfj
So, I work in psychiatry and have worked on many types of units for various
reasons over my career.

My impression is the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that the
vast majority of patients left in the cold are those who do have mental health
problems.

For a lot of these patients, it's not just that the physical symptoms are
unexplained, it's that they don't make physical sense. For example, the same
arm movement in one context causes pain; in another it's not painful at all.
The tremors don't make sense, the seizures don't make sense, the EEG readings
don't make sense, whatever. All the other stuff that is plausible is a long
tail that overlaps with misunderstood non-psychiatric problems.

And in many cases, it's painfully obvious. Like, someone develops a mysterious
unexplainable physical symptom right after they are divorced, or their child
dies. Nothing can treat it except antidepressants.

But they're also very defensive about any other possibility other than an
unrecognized non-psychiatric problem.

Combine this with the general zeitgeist in medical care where everything non-
neurological or physical in focus is ridiculed, and it's a horrible problem.

It's all made worse by a tendency to introduce mind-body dichotomies where
they don't exist, to criticize anything that isn't reductionist. That is, the
logic is everything is based in the brain, so it's all physical, therefore any
discussion of anything at other than that level is ridiculed, even when the
people working at the higher level (mental) themselves aren't suggesting any
kind of Cartesian duality.

We could go on... like all the modern psychotherapies (CBT) don't actually
work any better than anything else when you look at the meta-analytic
evidence, that a lot of modern cognitive science is based on two-system
theories (Kahneman anyone?) which are essentially psychodynamic in all but
name, that these discussions never admit for the possibility that maybe _some
individuals_ do fit a classical psychodynamic profile...

I really don't know anything in particular about this guy other than what the
article stated, but I'm sort of frustrated by the tendency to think that
because medicine went _way_ overboard with psychoanalysis decades ago, that it
means there wasn't _something_ essentially accurate about it in _some_ cases,
and that every claim by every patient about their symptoms should be taken at
face value because it feeds some contemporary medical paradigm.

In any event, I always feel weird defending this stuff at all because I
wouldn't say I'm psychoanalytic or anything... it just increasingly seems to
me that there's kind of a identity politics that plays into healthcare, where
it's not really about actual evidence or plausibility or anything.

False positives and negatives get pushed around in both directions depending
on your threshold. If every medically unexplained symptom is nonpsychiatric,
you lose the psychiatric problems; if it's all psychiatric, you lose the
nonpsychiatric cases.

Lots of evidence over many studies shows that the rate of false positive
diagnoses of psychiatric somatoform disorder (that is, something is labeled as
psychiatric when it's not) are not any different than for any other diagnostic
category. Yet we continue to discuss them as if it's huge.

------
rvn1045
In vipassana meditation the meditator focuses on sensations on the body from
head to toe, systematically moving down top to bottom and noticing the
sensations in each part - head, eyes, ears, nose, shoulders etc. when thoughts
arise you notice the sensations they create and over time you develop a map of
thoughts to sensations. as you meditate some past traumatic experiences may
arise and you may start to mentally react to it, but you notice that thinking
about that particular insult from the past may just be causing this
discofmrting sensation in some part of the body and you are reacting to the
discmfort/pain caused by that. by training your mind to maintain equanimity,
you realize that all these thoughts are doing is creating a sensation and
causing you to react, and over time you can become a little more detached to
it. what is weird though about these sensations though is that there might be
these knots tied up in your chest, and by focusing on the pain of these knots
you start to release a lot of old memories that caused you some kind of pain
in the past. the pain of those memories are stored as sensations in the body.
if your in a bad situation in your life mentally and psychologically it will
absolutely manifest itself in terms of physical symptoms. additionally I have
found that the combination of meditation and any kind of drugs - marijuana or
psychedelics can cause of a lot of that trauma to be released.

------
AltruisticGap
I think for this "intensive" approach to therapy the quality of presence and
non-judgemental approach of the therapist is really key for it to be
effective.

This is easier said than done. It's quite common to have therapists who have
themselves unresolved issues, thus limiting their ability to be truly present
with the patient.

People open up only when they feel safe, so the main "danger" underlined by
the critics in the article is to cause the patient to close up even more.

I did talk therapy and it was useful, but sometimes I wished it was more
"intensive". Unless you are super motivated to open up and bring things to the
table, the therapist is perfectly happy to hear you talk , for years if need
be.

I think part of the reason for this is that from the therapist and patient's
perspective, a talk session will almost always have _some_ effect. Simply to
be able to vent relieves a bit of stress (and associated symptoms)... but if
the patient keeps his shield up, and the therapist doesn't push buttons... or
ask salient questions... then this can just go on and on.

I don't see a problem with the "intensive" apporach described in the article,
so long as they are addressing patients with physical symptoms who have been
in and out of the medical support for years. Those are typically people who
are NOT already open to the idea that they may have unresolved trauma, and
even downright averse to it. So they are the ones who would benefit the most I
think, for a bit of a button pushing.

------
crazygringo
I'm struggling to see what's new here -- this has been known for decades.

Just look into any decent book on myofascial release massage, or rolfing, or
somatic meditation -- our long-term emotional states, repression, etc.
directly affect our muscles, posture, digestion, back pain, etc., and
releasing those emotional states can be achieved via a combination of
psychotherapy to address the emotional sources, and massage/rolfing to
simultaneously address their physical manifestations.

Performers like actors and singers tend to be especially aware of this, as
becoming physically free enough to perform at a high level often requires both
extensive therapy and bodywork, depending on your background. I've heard
Broadway singers talk about how reaching that level of tone production is 90%
psychological and only 10% technique.

True, most doctors as well as the general public seem mostly unaware of this,
but it's not exactly a secret or new either.

~~~
thaw13579
I'd be interested to read more about this -- can you recommend any references,
particularly regarding benefits for performance?

~~~
stevenicr
its been some years, so I'm a bit foggy - but some times ago some of the intro
classes for massage school here went into some details about various,
techniques that are not used as often or known as well even by those 'in the
industry' -

I think the Alexander Method, and Feldenkrais method were described as being
beneficially used to help actors (including voice actors) and performers
better their craft.

noted here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Technique#Uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Technique#Uses)

see also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldenkrais_Method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldenkrais_Method)

I am sure several types of exercises can benefit voice and acting - certainly
tai chi, yoga, chi kung, breathing exercise in general.. this new 'laughing
yoga' I've heard about - surely would make things better and not usually worse
- probably measurably.

------
pizza
Sometimes people on HN recommend the book "The Body Keeps Score" by Bessel van
der Kolk. Anyone read it? Thoughts?

~~~
sbenitoj
I’ve written about this on here numerous times, it’s changed my life.

Here’s one of the threads where I mentioned it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18573069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18573069)

------
mindgam3
Anyone who has ever experienced deep emotional release during physical
activity like yoga or massage knows that there is a connection between
emotions and the body. It is weird, at least to the typical western-
conditioned mind, but it is definitely there.

------
isomorph
I've found that my migraines have responded more to counselling than
medication although there are physical triggers too. My rosacea is also
reduced in severity by counselling, although not as dramatically.

------
everdev
Many therapists and spiritual guides will say that trauma is physically stored
in the body. Things like movement, dance, yoga, sounds, etc. help to loosen
the body and therefore loosen the grip of these traumatic experiences.

While I've seen and felt the benefits of how healing the body can heal the
mind is that phrase "storing trauma in the body" literally true or more of an
phrase that just helps people start talking better care of their body?

------
neom
First time I tried acupuncture I lay and balled my eyes out uncontrollably and
it wasn't related to physical pain but emotional release. Probably one of the
most bizarre things that have happened in my life.

~~~
medion
Same - as a born skeptic I was never sure about acupuncture. I tried it once
after my mom urged me, and I had never felt such a powerful sense of emotion
and calm afterward. Now that I'm thinking about it again, I have no idea why I
don't get it done regularly...

------
idclip
I’m a religious atheist, or a mystical one, by choice. (Please don’t pick on
my choice of words)

That road is full of drama and pain, and I’m very glad to have discovered Carl
Jung, Alan Watts and Robert Bly.

Health wise, it may be too late, but I’m still very very thankful, and wish I
discovered all this earlier.

If anyone here is suffering, send me a message. I will do my best so you
suffer less in this world.

------
hollerith
The concept of the so-called cell danger response strikes me (not a health-
care practitioner or researcher) as a promising explanation for how
psychological trauma causes chronic physical illness: in particular, the
trauma causes persistent changes in the brain, which keeps on activating the
cell danger response.

------
pella
[http://www.istdp.com/research](http://www.istdp.com/research)

------
costcopizza
Anyone interested in this might enjoy reading ‘The Body Keeps the Score’.

The body is the mind and vice versa.

------
d--b
Seriously? Western medicine waited 2018 to figure out that psychoanalysis is
real?!

------
bloak
It sounds like Sigmund Freud all over again. There have been so many new talk
therapies over the last 120 years it must be really hard to come up with
something that really is new.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
Yes; the "dynamic" in the method's name refers to a family of theories that
center on interactions between conscious and unconscious thought. It's a
tradition heavily influenced by Freud.

------
biztos
I have to say, that's a pretty classic click-bait headline.

"Mysterious illness blabla. Look what happened when unexpected blabla!"

How about:

"Canadian psychiatrist claims unexplained physical symptoms can be caused by
unresolved emotional trauma"

I'm sure some people will still find it worth reading.

~~~
kalkaran
I would have gone with "Canadian Psychiatrist is rebranding 40 year old
treatment".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Sarno](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Sarno)

~~~
0xcde4c3db
As far as I can tell, Sarno himself is mostly rebranding much older ideas from
psychosomatic medicine and psychodynamic psychotherapy, with his main
contribution being that he presents them in a way that people are less likely
to reject than the "proper" forms.

------
OpenBSD-empire
I'm surprised no one in this thread brought up the Adverse Childhood
Experiences study. An ACE of 6/10, as compared to a 0/10, may actually have
worse deleterious effects than a lifetime of smoking. A six score on average
dies twenty years younger than a zero (when correcting for lifestyles and
risk-behaviors between the two groups)!

------
sonnyblarney
Yeah this is Dianetics i.e. Scientology! I'm not supporting them at all, they
are a cult, but the the original basis for Scientology was Dianetics and it's
related to this.

~~~
theoh
"it's related to this". It sounds similar, maybe, but that doesn't mean that
it's the same thing. To glibly conflate this with Scientology is very sloppy
thinking.

Scientific progress calls for ideas and evidence to be evaluated _on their
merits_. Accusations of "guilt by association" when a particular idea happens
to vaguely resemble something else that has been debunked aren't part of that.

~~~
sonnyblarney
Unless looked at Dianetics at all, and it's historical weirdness, I'm going to
refer to your response as 'glib' if anything.

If you did, you'd see there are glaringly obvious relationship between what is
discussed in the article, and the basis of Dianetics; not just 'similar' they
are effectively describing the same thing.

" resemble something else that has been debunked aren't part of that."

'Dianetics' has not been debunked so much as it hasn't been studied because
it's full of all sorts of things that don't make sense (it would be
pointless). But - there are some interesting and possibly valid points in
there, for example - the idea described in this article. And consider that
_everything_ in psychology seems to be 'debunked' as we still don't have a
good framework for understanding the human mind. To boot - most psychological
'science' can't even be reproduced in 2018. And I literally mean _most_ [1].

Dianetics is mostly nutbars, but the similarity between what is described in
the article, and what was popularized by Dianetics long ago is not
superficial, it's quite strong. It doesn't matter that L Ron Hubbard was a
hustler.

[1] [https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-
studies-...](https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-
reproducibility-test-1.18248)

------
DubiousPusher
> Yet if a bad day can cause a headache, why can’t many bad days cause more
> serious physical problems, even decades later?

Wow. That's quite a leap.

~~~
defined
Not really such a leap. It’s pretty well-known[1] that unmanaged long-term
stress leads to physical ailments (some of which can be deadly serious),
including

\- Anxiety

\- Depression

\- Digestive problems

\- Headaches

\- Heart disease

\- Sleep problems

\- Weight gain

\- Memory and concentration impairment

[1] [https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-
manageme...](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-
management/in-depth/stress/art-20046037)

~~~
DubiousPusher
I'm not impuning the conclusion but the awful logic used to reach it. This is
tentamount to saying, "a good meal of delicious food can lift one's spirits,
therefore eating a rich diet everyday will make one happy!"

~~~
naasking
> This is tentamount to saying, "a good meal of delicious food can lift one's
> spirits, therefore eating a rich diet everyday will make one happy!"

That doesn't strike me as a faithful analogy. The original proposition is:
emotions caused ailment at time t1, so why can't emotions cause ailments at
time t2?

That's a perfectly valid hypothesis reached from simple deduction. You assert
a false equivalence of the two key propositions (lift one's spirits/make one
happy) which invalidates it as an analogy.

