![]() She writes along the same lines as Selye.Īny disturbance of body or mind creates yet another, second, very real disease. ![]() I’m going to switch to the term “second illness”, which was coined by Barbara Brown in her brilliant book Supermind. However Selye later remarked that he actually meant “strain” but that his knowledge of English at the time was not precise enough. He later coined the term “stress”, which has been accepted into the lexicon of most other languages. These pioneer observations led to his description of the effects of “noxious agents” as he at first called this. You can see where Selye’s thoughts were going with this and eventually he evolved a whole theory of “being sick” (not just the sickness). It was clear, says Selye, “That the many features of disease which were already manifest did not interest our teacher very much because they were “non-specific” and hence “of no use”, diagnostically, to the physician. Without them it was impossible to know precisely what the patient suffered from, and hence it was obviously impossible to recommend any efficient treatment against the disease. In contrast, says Selye, “The “characteristic” signs, which might help diagnose a specific disease, were either absent or very difficult to elicit.” Yet his teachers were insistent that without these specific signs, not much could be done. What Selye had spotted could be called the sickness of being sick, or stress related illness. It was all screamingly obvious to Selye, yet professors, he says, “seemed to attach very little significance to any of it.” Most had a fever (sometimes with mental confusion), an enlarged spleen or liver, inflamed tonsils, a skin rash and so forth. ![]() They seemed to ignore these remarkable common symptoms of being unwell: the patient “looked ill”, felt ill, had a coated tongue, complained of more or less diffuse aches and pains, and with intestinal disturbances, of loss of appetite. The young Selye was flabbergasted that this was never mentioned or taught by the professors. He noticed that whatever the disease, patients all had the same symptoms: not THE symptoms, that defined the specific illness, but general symptoms, that seemed to be present in ALL diseases. He is famous for a theory about stress related illness called The General Adaptation Syndrome.īut what got Selye started, he tells us in his classic book The Stress Of Life (first published in 1956), is observing sick people while he was a medical student. If you’ve never heard of him, Selye was an Austrian physician who ended up finally residing in Montreal, Canada, working at McGill University and ultimately Montreal University. ![]() If you’ve bought and read my Diet Wise, you’ll certainly know of him (chapter 7). Many of you will be familiar with the name of Hans Selye. ![]()
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