Health News.

A patient walks into a doctor’s office. He has had an accident followed by surgery which has overcome the crippling effect. Although the day is warm, his hands are cold and clammy. As a simple examination proceeds, sweat trickles down from his armpits. In this case the patient is well physically, but fear of returning to work on the machine that caused his accident was expressed as plainly by his sweat glands as though he had told it vocally.

No part of the body reveals emotions more plainly than skin, of which the sweat glands are part. The blushing of embarrassment is notorious, although it does not seem so common as the sweating reaction. Certain persons have the blush tendency, and those who wish to tease them may do so by getting their attention in company and then saying something slightly embarrassing. It is not necessary to agree with one investigator who says that blushing is a reaction to guilt and is associated with cold sores and a tendency to sunburn. In my salt-water days I had many most innocent sailing trips followed by cold sores and sunburn. Yet the writer appeased me somewhat by saying that the patient with these reactions is usually above the average in intelligence.

Of course emotions, like all our reactions and functions, are primarily for our benefit, even though it may be a bit difficult to determine how sweating from the armpits when nervous and blushing when embarrassed fit into this great scheme. The raising of blood pressure with excitement is easier to understand. Whether fear causes us to run away or anger starts us fighting, we use up energy at a faster rate, and higher blood pressure furnishes us a greater flow of blood, bringing in oxygen and taking away carbon dioxide and other waste materials at a commensurate speed. This is all very well, yet when the Reverend Stephen Hales showed how to measure blood pressure he may have helped out researchers, but he made a lot of needless worry, not only to hypochondriacs, but to nearly everyone who reads scare medical articles and has to be examined by doctors.

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GENERAL HEALTH