Gastrointestinal problems are common worldwide and they are becoming commoner. There are in all millions of people in the developed countries of the world who regularly suffer from stomach complaints such as indigestion, gastritis and peptic ulceration. It is said that if five people sit down to dinner one of them will suffer from indigestion afterwards.
The intestinal or alimentary tract has the simple function of making food supplies available to the body and allowing the unwanted surplus to be discharged at the distant end of the tract. Since the whole system is basically a rather long tube it is quite reasonable to argue that food passing through the alimentary tract isn’t actually inside the body at all until it has been absorbed through the intestinal wall at some point.
An average sort of intestinal tract in an average sort of adult will be about 9 metres(30 feet) long and those 9 metres of gut are divided into a number of different parts. Each part of the intestinal tract has its own job to do.
The first part of the tube is called the oesophagus or gullet and this does nothing more than simply carry food directly from the mouth to the stomach. The stomach is dilated in comparison to the rest of the tract and looks a bit like one of those leather drinking bottles that nomads carry with them through the desert, or a small, slightly misshapen hot water bottle.
Within an hour or two after a meal has been eaten the stomach will be empty and the partly digested food will have been passed on through a fairly narrow orifice into the duodenum. The orifice which divides the stomach from the duodenum is guarded by a muscular valve called the pyloric sphincter which only opens when food is ready to move on out of the stomach.
By the time food gets into the duodenum it will have been attacked by the enzymes in both human saliva and the stomach’s own digestive juices. In the duodenum it is met by bile which is produced by the liver and which helps digest fat, and by the enzymes which are produced by the pancreas to help break down proteins, fats and starch.
The more or less completely digested food is now passed on into the small intestine where another set of enzymes completes the digestive process and where the resultant tiny particles are absorbed into the wall of the intestine.
By the time food has got to the end of the small intestine and is about to enter the part of the intestinal tract known as the large bowel it is little more than waste residue. Water is removed in the colon and mucus is secreted to help the stools pass easily along to the exit point; the actual digestive process has finished much earlier on
To help countless sufferers cope there are countless products on the market. The sales of over-the-counter remedies for stomach upsets rise annually and each year the major drug companies introduce many new products designed to help doctors deal with such problems as indigestion, gastritis and peptic ulceration.
Unfortunately, most of the remedies which exist and which are sold by drug companies or advocated by doctors are designed basically to relieve the symptoms and deal with the damage that has already been done. And while these solutions will often provide temporary relief it is, I’m afraid, quite true to say that in many cases the relief will be just that - temporary. Within months or eve weeks the symptoms will have recurred and the sufferer will be no better off.
I believe that there is convincing evidence that the majority of stomach symptoms are either caused or exacerbated by stress and that consequently a long-term solution to the problem can be obtained by concentrating on the cause rather than the effect. I intend to show why I believe that so many stomach symptoms are associated with stress, what sort of problems cause stress and precisely how stress can be controlled and those symptoms can best be relieved.
The Nature of Stress
*Although the subject of stress has been discussed in a great many different magazines and newspapers over the years there are still many misconceptions about precisely what stress is and what sort of people suffer from it.
Even the very word `stress’ is the subject of much confusion, for some people use ot to describe the sort of activity, pressure and strain that cause mental anguish and physical damage, while others use it as a general term to describe the physiological response to pressure. II have used the word stress to refer to the sort of pressures that cause problems rather than the physical and mental problems themselves. I have used the phrase `stress-induced disease’ to refer to disorders produced by stress.
*Who suffers from stress?
*If you asked the average man or woman in the street to describe the sort of individual he thought might be most likely to suffer from too much stress he would probably mention taxi-drivers, airline pilots, air traffic controllers and business executives. Indeed I suspect that some people imagine that stress is something endured almost exclusively by harassed businessmen rushing from airport to airport, clutching alligator cases stuffed to the twin brass combination locks with documents and contracts.
In practice, of course, it is quite impossible to classify stress sufferers by occupation or by any other criterion. The simple truth is that anyone can suffer from too much stress and it is the individual’s susceptibility to stress rather than the extent of the stress which governs the amount of damage that is done.
Some people are extremely vulnerable to stress and they will suffer a good deal from a fairly minimal amount of pressure. Other individuals, in contrast, are capable of withstanding enormous pressures without suffering any ill-effects at all and may indeed seem to thrive as the pressure builds up. This is not, of course, a phenomenon which is peculiar to stress. It is just as true to say that some people are more susceptible than others to colds.
Ravi Sharma
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