It is said that most of those who consult an ordinary physician complain of some personal distur-bance; this article explains to you how to overcome weakness and dispense with the use of medicine.

For more than a century medicine has known that emotional factors bring on pain of the heart, "attacks," and certain fevers or skin diseases. But the body's susceptibility to states of the mind reaches further than this, and it has been proved: tests were even carried out upon patients which made clear that they were losing enthusiasm—broken in will, walking through life without an aim, and complaining that the days followed one another at a single monotonous pace. The doctor told one of them that there was a shortage of sugar in the blood; yet examination proved that the quantity of sugar was normal, equal to his need.

The patients were treated by both the bodily and the psychological method, and when their mental condition improved, the sugar their blood had lost increased. What is the cause of this?

Testing shows that the following causes produce this illness: a woman's despair of solving her marital problems; a man's rise to a post in which he feels he cannot satisfy his superiors; a woman who gave up her ambition to bear or to adopt a child; an artist forced to abandon his art and go out to work... a woman who com-pelled herself to work although she wished to marry. The one thread running through these different problems is the abandon-ment of a goal for which the individual was fitted and toward which he had been working.

Research in one hospital has proved that psychological distur-bances bring on stomach ulcer.

A group of ulcer patients was brought in and passed under medical observation in a test that draws out many emotions and feelings; whenever they suffered pain from longing or from some offense, the acid secretion increased. The very same result occurred in a healthy group, except that the secretion was less. Psychological testing made clear that these patients had not merely gone deeper into emotion than others; they always showed themselves independent and self-confident.

The prevailing idea—that a person's illness must be either bodily or mental—is an error, for most bodily patients have psychological problems alongside the physical disease. Even doctors themselves sometimes fall into this error, supposing that the body has no connection with the mind. Smallpox, croup, and certain contagious diseases result from a germ; but the presence of this germ does not deny the disease's relation to the psyche during the period of its struggle, for the emotional effect plays an important part in killing the germ or in strengthening it.

The bloodstream contains the defending corpuscles against germs, but their action quickly changes when it is affected by emotion; and upon feeling grief or anger, changes occur through-out the whole body—quickened breathing, heartbeats, a change in the course of the blood, contraction of the muscles, and other passing effects.

If a man faces a wild beast in a forest, he stands before two cour-ses: flight, or fight. His reaction is of the kind of anger, or grief, and the effect of this extends,