A MATTER OF BALANCE I FEATURE
Dr. David Rainham has much to teach about stress.
IT WAS IN THE EARLY 1970s when Dr. David Rainham began to notice a growing number of patients coming to his local practice with severe symptoms that couldn’t be linked to any known physical disease. One of the first was a middle-aged man complaining of constant headaches. He appeared perfectly healthy, but was convinced he had cancer. Then there was the young mother who came to see him with an acute rash that wouldn’t go away. She too appeared in good shape other than the persistent itchy redness on her skin.
“It didn’t take long before I realized that these symptoms were in fact related to a state of anxiety,” says the family physician.
Instead of dismissing these patients or running a long list of tests he was sure would come up negative, Rainham treated them by simply asking them about what was going on in their lives. It was through listening that he was able to make them aware that their symptoms were the result of stress.
“Back then people didn’t come in saying they were stressed out,” says Rainham, who is also an associate professor in the department of family medicine at the University of Western Ontario. “I learned that the best thing I could do for them was to let them talk.”
By listening, he learned that the middleaged man had recently started working twice as much because his business partner was away from work with a brain tumour. He was rarely home, and when he was, he had to deal with his wife’s concerns that he was too busy with his job to spend time with the family.
As for the young mother, her husband had lost his job, fallen into a deep depression and the family had gone bankrupt. The husband refused to look for work or handle household responsibilities, so she was >>