“Laid-back people can heal up to twice as rapidly as those who are very stressed, research indicates. Scientists inflicted small ”punch” wounds on healthy volunteers whose levels of life stress were assessed using a standard questionnaire. Changes in levels of the stress hormone cortisol reflected the differences in healing speed.
A similar pattern emerged from an analysis of pooled data from 22 studies by different research groups examining stress and wound healing. Professor John Weinman, from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, presented the findings at the Cheltenham Science Festival.
Previously, he showed that wound healing can be enhanced by psychological help aimed at addressing emotional stress.
Prof Weinman said: ”My overall research interests are focused on investigating and assessing how patients perceive illness and treatment, and how this affects the way they respond to and recover from a range of physical health problems. ”These studies focus specifically on how the life stresses people experience can impact on their ability to recover from different types of wound, such as those caused by surgical procedures and by different medical conditions, including venous leg ulcers. ”I hope that these findings can now be used to identify psychological interventions to help speed up the recovery and healing process.””
Read more at The Telegraph (Thanks Katie)
…well, my mutant healing factor sorted! Now for the claws, ‘snikt, snikt…’
So when will the overcrowding in hospital wards be addressed? Why are there only paper curtains between the transplant patients in the noisy new ward at St Thomas’s hospital? Why are ‘deaf’ patients allowed to blast their TVs whenever they like, upping the stress levels of those around them? They need to sort out these simple, common sense stress factors out. And while they’re at it, a nice massage here and there would probably bump up the recovery factor.
Unless they are too relaxed ofcourse …
Vampires must be pretty relaxed I’d say after having read this article …
Healing depends on many things .. not only stress .. but I do agree that too much stress wont work well when it comes to healing. Professional sportsmen/women probably know all about that .. after having run a marathon the body will not heal so well either for a while ..
There’s only so much of energy going on in the body … and can only be used so much at the same time .. aparently healing wounds, minor ones, is not always body’s first priority.