Islamic Medicine History and Current Practice - International Society ...

MAJNOON LILAH. A. Hajar AL BINALIciated with somatic symptoms. The clinical characteristicsare feelings of tension and nervous discomfortassociated with cardiac symptoms as follows:awareness of changes in the heartbeats, whichbecome more rapid and forceful; sharp and stickingchest pain that lasts for a few seconds only, unrelatedto exertion, not relieved by cessation of activity andmay come on while the patient is in bed, resting.Even the respiration symptoms are dominated withdiscomfort, a sense of not being able to get enoughair into the lungs, a feeling of fullness in the chest,and inadequate respiration. The patient often breathesmore rapidly and more deeply and may feel compelledto run out of doors to get more air.Hyperventilation may cause respiratory alkalosis.The CNS symptoms are as follows: dizziness isdescribed as awareness of irregular blurring andswimming motion of the surroundings. There is usuallya sense of light-headedness and faintness (2).A modern psychiatrist, Richard B. Rosse, whoseemed to have studied the phenomenon of love problem,calls it “Love Trauma Syndrome.” He wrote:“Love Trauma Syndrome is a form of traumaticgrief that does not have to involve the death of adesired and loved person. Like its diagnostic cousinsPost-traumatic Stress Disorder and traumatic grief,many patients with “Love Trauma Syndrome” present“on the surface” with more conventional diagnosessuch as depression, anxiety and substance usedisorder. It can be a serious condition with considerablepsychosocial impairments. Sometimes, LoveTrauma Syndrome is associated with suicidal orhomicidal ideation. It can also be associated withconsiderable dissociation and symptoms of hyperarousal(e.g., insomnia). Love Trauma Syndrome canbe associated with anger, irritability, and revengefantasies” (3).The same author has written a book titled, LoveTrauma Syndrome (4). He wrote:“Love is one of the most exhilarating emotions weexperience, unfortunately, it is also one of the mostpainful and sometimes traumatic. The unresolvedemotional scars from a broken heart can manifest asa “love trauma syndrome”. At times, the syndromecan seriously diminish the sufferer’s quality of life,JISHIM 2003, 2and dramatically impair social, academic, and occupationalactivities. Patients may end up committingsuicide. A few become so obsessed by their lost lovesthat they are driven to stalk, attack... and ultimatelycommit suicide. Most patients however, suffer aloneand in silence without ever resorting to an act ofphysical violence.Love Trauma Syndrome is a clinical disorder of“too much memory” in which the past intrudes uponthe present to influence thoughts, feelings, andbehaviors to a much greater extent than is expected.It can also be associated with a variety of otherbehavioral problems: the avoidance of future lovingrelationships, nervousness, feeling “unreal” or out ofplace, anger, and sleep disturbances” (4).Galen’s theory that the loved one “preoccupied” aplace in the brain of the lover seems to be substantiatednowadays with fast MRI. The activity in thebrains of 17 subjects who were deeply in love wasscanned using fMRI, while they viewed pictures oftheir partners, and compared with the activity producedby viewing pictures of three friends of similarage, sex and duration of friendship as their partners.The activity was restricted to foci in the medial insulaand the anterior cingulate cortex and, subcortically,in the caudate nucleus and the putamen, all bilaterally.Deactivations were observed in the posteriorcingulate gyrus and in the amygdala and were rightlateralizedin the prefrontal, parietal and middle temporalcortices. The combination of these sites differsfrom those in previous studies of emotion, suggestingthat a unique network of areas is responsible forevoking this affective state. This leads us to postulatethat the principle of functional specialization in thecortex applies to affective states as well (5).The cardiology literature (6) states that psychosocialfactors contribute significantly to the pathogenesisand expression of coronary artery disease (CAD).This evidence is composed largely of data relatingCAD risk to 5 specific psychosocial domains: (1)depression, (2) anxiety, (3) personality factors andcharacter traits, (4) social isolation, and (5) chroniclife stress. Psychosocial stress can lead, probably viaa mechanism involving excessive sympathetic nervoussystem activation, to exacerbation of coronaryartery atherosclerosis as well as to transient endothe-7