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Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America

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Rebecca J. Lester

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“For many years I was under the impression that TMS was a kind of physical expression or discharge of the repressed emotions just described. In fact, this is what I suggested in the first edition of this book. I had been aware since the early 1970s that these common back and neck pain syndromes were due to repressed emotions. Eighty-eight percent of a large group of patients with TMS had a history of other tension-related disorders, like stomach ulcers, colitis, tension headache, and migraine headache. But the idea of TMS as a physical manifestation of nervous tension was somehow unsatisfactory and incomplete. Most important, it did not explain the repeated observation that making a patient aware of the role of the pain as participant in a psychological process would lead to cessation of pain, to a "cure." (page 56)”

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“It was a psychoanalyst colleague, Dr. Stanley Coen, who suggested in the course of our working on a medical paper together that the role of the pain syndrome was not to express the hidden emotions but to prevent them from becoming conscious. This, he explained, is what is referred to as a defense. In other words, the pain of TMS (or the discomfort of a peptic ulcer, of colitis, of tension headache, or the terror of an asthmatic attack) is created in order to distract the attention of the sufferer from what is going on in the emotional sphere. It is intended to focus one's attention on the body instead of the mind. It is a response to the need to keep those terrible, antisocial, unkind, childish, angry, selfish feelings (the prisoners) from becoming conscious. It follows from this that far from being a physical disorder in the usual sense, TMS is really part of a psychological process.”

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“You should breathe through your mouth as often as you eat through your nose! * * * Consequences of chronic mouth breathing: - Face distortion because mouth breathing affects the facial profile. John Mew who pioneered the field of Orthotropics found that the face becomes long and teeth become bucky over time in habitual mouth breathers. - Dental crowding - Tooth decay: This is because mouth becomes very dry overnight from mouth breathing. After 3-4 hours of mouth breathing, the mouth pH becomes more acidic. When teeth are acidic (< pH 5.4 ) they start to deteriorate and tend towards decay. - Anxiety, because when breathing through the mouth, the sympathetic nervous system is activated. The vagus nerve connects the brain to the gut and regulates our stress response. Engaging in relaxation and nose-breathing can help with vagal toning and regulation of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. - Gut dysbiosis because of the sympathetic activation making parasympathetic digestion less effective. - Brain fog - Learning difficulties - Night time bedwetting in children”

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Author:Vijaya Molloy
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“The physiology of TMS begins in the brain. Here repressed emotions like anxiety and anger set in motion a process in which the autonomic nervous system causes a reduction in blood flow to certain muscles, nerves, tendons, or ligaments, resulting in pain and other kinds of dysfunction in these tissues. The autonomic nervous system is a subsystem of the brain that has the responsibility for controlling all of the body's involuntary functions. It determines how fast the heart beats, how much acid is secreted into the stomach for digestive purposes, how rapidly one breathes, and a host of other moment-to-moment physiologic processes that keep our bodies functioning optimally under everyday circumstances or in emergencies. The so-called fight or flight reaction that all animals share, particularly important in lower animals, is directed by the autonomic system. In order to meet the emergency, every organ and system in the body is properly prepared. For some systems it means total cessation of activity so that the body's resources can be mobilized to deal with the danger more effectively. Typically, most of the body's nutritive and excretory activities are shut down, the heart beats more rapidly, and blood is shunted away from less important functions so as to be available in larger quantities for systems that are crucial to escape or fight, like the muscles. The critical importance of the autonomic system of nerves is obvious. (page: 71)”

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“The term trigger points, which has been around for many years, refers to the pain elicited when pressure is applied over various muscles in the neck, shoulders, back, and buttocks. There is some controversy over what precisely is painful, but most would agree that it is something in the muscle. Rheumatologists, who have taken the lead in studying fibromyalgia (TMS), appear to avoid using the term, probably because of its association with other diagnoses through the years. I neither use it nor avoid it, for I have concluded that these points of tenderness are merely the central zones of oxygen deprivation. Further, there is evidence that some of these points of tenderness may persist for life in TMS-susceptible people, like me, though there may be no pain. In the first chapter, the point was made that most patients with TMS will have tenderness at six key points: the outer aspect of both buttocks, both sides of the small of the back (lumbar area), and the top of both shoulders. These tender points, trigger points, call them what you will, are the hallmark findings in TMS, and they are the ones that tend to persist after the pain is gone. It is an important part of the physiology of TMS to know that the brain has chosen to implicate these muscles in creating the syndrome we know as TMS. Patients sometimes ask if breathing pure oxygen will relieve the pain. This has been tried and, unfortunately, does not help. If the brain intends to create a state of oxygen deprivation, it will do so regardless of how oxygen rich the blood is.”

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