Having had a chronic illness for 20 years, it has sometimes felt like I've had a volcano inside of me - out of my control, traumatic, and life-altering.But research explaining links between chronic illness, trauma and the nervous system has made sense of my illness. It has also helped me ...
Epigenetics
Adverse Babyhood Experiences and Rheumatoid Disease / Arthritis (ABEs & RA)
In her memoir "Sonata" about living with rheumatoid arthritis, piano virtuoso Andrea Avery wonders whether being born cesarean or not being breastfed affected her risk of getting a debilitating, life-altering disease. Readers on Kelly Young's Rheumatoid Arthritis Warrior blog also share ...
Brain Plasticity and Chronic Illness: Life Experiences Change the Brain via “Pruning”
Have you ever wished for evidence that life events affect our health because they influence brain plasticity and gene function, rather than because it's psychological? The links between brain plasticity and chronic illness are real. Millions of neurons grow in our nervous systems and elsewhere in ...
Epigenetics and Chronic Illness: Why Symptoms May Be More Reversible Than We’ve Thought
This post introduces insights from links between adverse life events, epigenetics and chronic illness. It describes how this new science suggests that chronic physical diseases and other health conditions thought to be permanent may be instead be much more reversible than we've thought (("Metabolic ...
Trauma and Chronic Illness: 19 Characteristics that Can Make Sense of Symptoms (Summary of the Science)
There are a lot of unanswered questions about chronic illness. Why do so many of us develop our diseases after periods of stress, for example? Why are we then unable to recover by addressing, removing or reducing the stress in our lives? Why do some people with type 1 diabetes, or chronic ...