THE SLIM BOOK OF HEALTH PEARLS:
HORMONES,
NERVES, AND
STRESS
SHELDON COHEN M.D. FACP
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
A graduate of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Sheldon Cohen has practiced Internal Medicine, served as a medical director of a Chicago area Catholic Hospital and two Health Maintenance Organizations, taught physical diagnosis and internal medicine at two Chicago area medical schools, served as a quality consultant for hospitals in the United States, Europe and South America, served as a consultant to the Ministry of Health in Ukraine, lectures to lay audiences on medical topics and is the author of fifteen books.
Copyright 2012 Sheldon Cohen M.D. FACP,
All rights reserved.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0931-3
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MEDICAL DEFINITION
STRESS: it can save your life or kill you.
To understand this contradiction we’ll start from the beginning.
Stress is defined as the response of the body to a “demand” placed upon it by any nonspecific stress or stressors. At the beginning of the demand the body prepares itself for fight or flight. This first stage is instantaneous and intense and can only be sustained for a short interval. Assuming survival and with continuous and/or recurrent demand, there ensues stages of adaptation, which if not relieved will result in wear and tear of the body causing a multiplicity of illnesses and premature aging.
HISTORY
Hans Selye (1907-1982) is the father of modern stress theory. How did it start?
As a young endocrinologist in the 1930’s, working in Canada, he embarked upon research to discover a new sex hormone. He injected laboratory rats with an ovarian extract hoping to produce physical changes in the rats which would prove the new hormone’s existence. What he found instead were rats with bleeding stomach ulcers, enlargement of the adrenal glands, and shrinkage of the spleen, thymus and lymph nodes (the reasons for these change will be discussed later). Upon injecting the rats with an entirely different extract, to his surprise he duplicated the previous results. He reasoned that the cause of the findings in the rats had nothing to do with exposure to an unknown sex hormone, but rather resulted from an exposure to some “toxic” agent. This was all reminiscent of what he learned as a young medical student in Czechoslovakia where patients with different infectious diseases manifested symptoms in common making it difficult to diagnose a specific disease based upon the patient’s symptoms. He finally reasoned that these rats had some variables they all shared resulting in similar changes to their bodies. What were the variables that caused these physiological changes in their lives?
The only things that his rats had in common was that they were all captives, were locked in cages, injected often, chased around the room when they escaped their cages, and, in general, were not happy campers. They were under “stress” on a daily basis thus causing the similar changes in their physiology. From this came the concept of a “General Adaptation Syndrome,” or stress reaction. What Dr. Selye had discovered was the body-mind connection, the concept of stress changing body physiology and promoting disease; an amazing leap forward in medical knowledge.
So, with that background, what is the human stress reaction? How does it work its magic to save lives? How does it injure or kill? What parts of the body are involved in this schizophrenic physiology? To understand this we need to learn about:
1.The endocrine system
2.The nervous system
These are the principle players in this intense drama.
First we start with the endocrine system as it was understood in the early 1900’s.
ENDOCRINOLOGY CIRCA 1900
Endocrine glands produce and secrete hormones into the blood stream. Early 1900 Physicians and scientists believed that the endocrine glands worked autonomously; each doing its own thing independent of the other.
Hormones are chemical substances which act on the body to:
1.Direct the body’s metabolism (all the body’s physical and chemical processes)
2.Regulate body growth, sexual development and functioning
3.Assist in the coordination of the functions of different parts of the body
This last statement is true today, but was not understood in the early 1900s.
The known glands, their hormones, and their “autonomous” function at that time were as follows:
•THYROID GLAND secretes hormones that regulate body metabolism
•PARATHYROID GLAND four embedded in the thyroid gland regulate calcium levels in the blood and bone metabolism
•REPRODUCTIVE GLANDS (OVARIES, TESTES) responsible for the sex hormones that produce male characteristics and sperm production, and female characteristics, egg production, menstruation, and pregnancy
And finally and with most relevance to our study of stress the
•ADRENAL GLANDS These glands (two…each one perched on top of the kidneys) are triangular shaped glands composed of two parts:
1.The outer part known as the adrenal cortex produces hormones called GLUCOCORTICOIDS), which regulates the body’s metabolism, salt and water metabolism, the immune system (not understood in the early 1900’s) and also plays a part in sexual function…and
2.The inner part known as the adrenal medulla produces EPINEPHRINE (adrenalin), which helps the body confront physical and emotional stress by increasing blood pressure and heart rate and force.
The book will concentrate principally on the adrenal glands that play a major role in the stress reaction.
Before continuing on with the exciting and interesting story of the stress response, here is a fascinating sidelight.
MONKEY GLANDS
Since in the early 1900’s, the information about the immune system and rejection phenomenon of the human body were not yet known, an interesting industry grew up around the concept that all the endocrine glands worked autonomously. Championed by a medical doctor, “monkey glands” (code for testicle slices) were transplanted into the scrotum of patients. Since the male ego has always sought the secret
