Stress: Can Be the Culpit in Your Backache

"Stress So Bad It Hurts -- Really" is the headline for Melinda Beck's article in the March 17th Wall Street Journal that explains the toll that stress can take on our physical well-being. She quotes from Christopher L. Edwards, director of the Behavioral Chronic Pain Management program at Duke University Medical Center:

Decades ago, when doctors said a condition was psychosomatic, it was the equivalent of saying it wasn't real, since there was little evidence that the body and the brain were connected. "Now, we recognize that what happens in the brain affects the body and what happens in the body affects the brain," he says. That knowledge gives us the tools to try to manage the situation, he adds.

Dr. Edwards says his pain-management program in Durham, N.C., is seeing a rise in patients amid the current economic crisis: "There's a very strong relationship between the economy and the number of out-of-control stress cases we see."

You'll have to read the article for yourself as I don't have time to add more to this blog post. I'm off to the gym with my exercise partner to relieve my own stress.

Read this Wall Street Journal article on stress now.
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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL and the co-author of the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. She also blogs at Mrs. Lieutenant and Operation Support Jews in the Military, and she is the co-host of the BlogTalkRadio show Your Military Life. Her company Miller Mosaic LLC builds call-to-action websites for book authors and small businesses.