Accessing the body’s aurascope

“How can you know if you are really sick? Like life-threatening, need-to-get-help-right-away sort of sick.

In my Emergency Department, life-threatening illness is often spotted as easily as pornography and poor fashion sense—we know it when we see it. But for most people, in most situations, sorting out true illness can be difficult. Many healthy folks seek care for nothing because they are anxious about disease, while some very unwell people stick it out at home, in full-on denial or stoically convinced that they can will themselves better. What’s the difference between a mind that causes illness and one that can detect sickness early? This would seem to be an important question not only for the field of medicine but also for every single living and thinking “patient” in the world.

Auras and Premonitions

Do we, as humans, have a muted and under-recognized sense of our own sickness? With better recognition skills, could people serve as their own triage nurses? Phone advice lines are great, but wouldn’t it be nice if our patients had a reliable sense of sickness—an epiphany of medical impairment? Well, let’s consider some examples, starting with the “aura”: The aura that “precedes the headache of migraine is very mysterious… there is a process of intense activity which seems to spread, like the ripples in a pond into which a stone is throw.” Auras, as we know, are also common in people with migraines and epilepsy and come in a wide variety of forms—a kaleidoscope of lights, the smell of burnt toast, the sound of a public address announcer booming—and may occur seconds to hours before the onset of a headache or seizure. For a patient with epilepsy or a migraineur, the aura is an extremely reliable indicator of impending symptoms (far more accurate than routinely available clinical evaluation or testing.) Absent fancy tests like continuous functional MRI or EEG monitoring, most would consider auras the gold standard of disease prediction.

Is it possible then that auras are a prominent manifestation of an innate mental ability to detect illness that represents a more global function: a synthesis of inputs that triggers a sense and premonition of impending illness or death?

Premonitions of death are also common in trauma patients; in a 2009 survey-based study by Miglietta and colleagues of 302 members of the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma, ninety-five percent of respondents reported encountering patients who expressed such a premonition and fifty percent agreed that patients expressing such premonitions had a higher mortality rate [4]. Fifty-seven percent also agreed with the belief that patient willpower affects outcome while forty-four percent were on board with the notion that patients have an innate ability to sense their ultimate outcome after injury.

Now, such “evidence” must be considered in light of its limitations. Recall bias is an obvious limitation—there are surely many pregnant women and trauma patients who thrive or recover despite premonitions to the contrary. And, of course, absent a biological explanation, it’s impossible to prove that humans have an innate sense of sickness. I would argue, though, that we should not be overly skeptical.”

Read the full article here!

Reflection: Do you believe we humans have an innate sense of sickness and death? Have you ever experienced this yourself?

#Premention #Death #Ilness #Aura