\u201cAnd when was the last time you were silly?\u201d This might well be on the standard list of questions asked by one\u2019s doctor. \u201cIf it\u2019s been over a week, it\u2019s not okay.\u201d Wow! I mean, what if this is right? What if this becomes part of the medical \u201creview of systems\u201d that every doctor must attend to?<\/p>\n
Perhaps I\u2019m being silly, but becoming light-hearted may well be an element in good health. Dr. Gabor Mate\u2019 reminded me recently of something that was a part of medicine in the years when psychoanalysis was at its peak\u2014the effects of attitude and state of mind on health: \u201cPsychosomatic Medicine.\u201d It\u2019s not conscious, and you have to take some time to get to that layer. Brief therapy doesn\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n
Psychosomatic medicine has almost dropped from view, but perhaps it should not. It\u2019s elusive, hard to pin down facts, difficult to measure in tests and correlations. This should not eliminate what we know intuitively to be so: Stress and personality make a difference in health. Duh: It\u2019s sort of obvious if you aren\u2019t too wedded to being mechanistic-minded. Trying to pin everything down in indisputable terms may be cutting off lots of stuff which can not be indisputable, but still is vaguely obvious.<\/p>\n
Back to silly, fun, joyous, joking, twinkling of eye, yummy and other elusive emotions: Difficult to specify scientifically, these, but everyone knows. Trying to be skeptical about everything in the quest for hard scientific proof can be taken too far. Of course, everyone knew that the sun went around the earth, so a measure of scientific skepticism serves an expansion of wisdom, but hey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cAnd when was the last time you were silly?\u201d This might well be on the standard list of questions asked by one\u2019s doctor. \u201cIf it\u2019s been over a week, it\u2019s not okay.\u201d Wow! I mean, what if this is right? What if this becomes part of the medical \u201creview of systems\u201d that every doctor must […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-play-and-spontaneity","category-literacy","category-psychotherapy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2093"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2093"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2094,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2093\/revisions\/2094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}