EMOTIONS AND HEALTH

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 108, 31 January 1921, Page 5

EMOTIONS AND HEALTH

Tho emotions have a direct effect on health, for it is imi>ossiblo to cure some people of illness if the emotions are much dJisiturbed, writes a physician in t'he Loudon “Dailj’ Mail.” For example, insomnia cannot be cured in a man who has been persistently robbing his firm, or dyspepsia in a woman who has been unfaithful to her husband and fears discovery.

A person with an emotional temperament suffers untold agonies wholly unknown to the unemotional.

The latter typo will recover readily from most illnesses and will be regarded by the doctor in attendance as standing proof of the efficacy of medicine. The emotional subject, on the other hand, will be constantly having setbacks in the course of an illness, lor no apparent reason; temperature will run up and down again in an unexplained way.

Such people always have aches and anxieties, they take medicine by the gallon, love doctors, but change them as they would their charwoman! Emotional temperaments are of two types: (1) unrestrained, p.ud l (2) reelre.incd. The first type are intense in all they do. They work with feverish energy in fits and starts, but are soon exhausted; many eventually become the mainstay of "rest-cure” institutions. They suffer frequently from loss of appetite, abdominal pain and constipation, headaches, dead fingers, palpitation, and finally all forms of hysteria. The second type feel emotions strongly, but have also strong powers of control. Such people suffer much from byperconscicntious scruples and religious fervour, and as a result they become exhausted comparatively quickly and end their days as hopeless dyspeptics or discontented neurasthenics.

Nowadays people arc more alive to the influence of mind over boity, but mental therapeutics still need to be used more in fhe prevention of disease; so that tho public must realise that doctors are obliged now to dispense more platitudes than pills.