Chronic Illness Trauma Studies
How Adversity Shapes Health & Why It's Not In Your Head
Do you ever wonder if your chronic illness or other health condition was influenced by prenatal stress? Or from being born prematurely or by cesarean, or both? Or why, if you're a mother, you didn't feel that sense of connection to your baby that you'd dreamed of or that your friends experienced? I ...
I've described how chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a disease driven by a cell danger response (CDR) and a nervous system caught in a threat response of freeze and some of us with an underlying fight/flight response (wired and tired) in Part 1. This second post describes how the CDR gets stuck ...
This post contains a group of chronic fatigue syndrome questionnaires (ME/CFS surveys) and serves as a short companion to other, more detailed blog posts. Post I introduces Dr. Robert Naviaux' research on the cell danger response (CDR) and how ME/CFS represents a metabolic state of freeze. Post IIA ...
This series of blog posts presents the science linking chronic illness and trauma. It introduces research that made me think differently about disease from what I learned as a doctor. It may that help you think differently too, as well as understand why events that trigger the onset of disease are ...
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 ...
The research presented in the past 3 posts taught me that adversity, trauma and stress during pregnancy as well as during birth and infancy increase risk for chronic illness such as type 1 diabetes and asthma. And that my mother and I had experienced similarly stressful events. This post ...
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 possible ...
Can stressful or traumatic events cause chronic disease? Today's post introduces studies linking stress, trauma and epigenetics in early life including during pregnancy, labor and birth. The research offers insights into how and why life experiences affect long-term health. It's not ...
This second post of my chronic illness and trauma series builds on early risk factors for autoimmune disease such as type 1 diabetes that I introduced in post #1. It focuses on similar links between adverse babyhood experiences and asthma. Here you'll see how a child's chronic illness - asthma in ...
