The patient often can
help the physician in the diagnosis when the patient is aware of the guises
that emotional dis- orders can assume and when he is aware, too, that physical
distress may be so overwhelming that it is easy to forget the emotional
problems.
By making certain that he informs the physician about his tensions at
work and at home, the patient can help speed diagnosis and possibly avoid a
long, costly, and uncomfortable chase after a physical cause that does not
exist. It is often said that in today's world, stresses, tensions, and
emotional onslaughts have replaced yesterday's big hazards of hunger and
infection.
We are more hurried than our parents, exposed to more
stimulation than we may have been constructed to take. Ours is a fast-moving
world, with values constantly changing, leaving us no stable value system to
cling to and help steady us. While some or much of this may be true, nobody
would want to live, or could, without emotions. They may cause trouble but they
do not necessarily have to do so.
The individual can learn to handle them and
to use them constructively. Medical counseling often can help. If necessary,
psychotherapy-quite often, brief, simple, supportive psychotherapy-can be used.
Special medicines, too, are available for wise use -for example, when they can
help bring runaway, illness-producing emotions under control, buying time for
the individual to learn to handle them and redirect them constructively.
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