I'm really looking forward to reading Anne Harrington's new book on the history of mind-body medicine. I thought this factoid, from her interview with the Boston Globe Ideas section, was quite interesting:
IDEAS: One of the things I learned reading the book is that there's no word for "hot flashes" in Japanese because menopausal women there don't get them.HARRINGTON: This is the work of an anthropologist named Margaret Lock, who looked at older Japanese women and found that this very common symptom of menopause in Western countries didn't seem to be widely known in Japan.
IDEAS: How does she explain that?
HARRINGTON: Some people said maybe this really has to do with the fact that they eat a lot more soy, and we know that soy contains chemicals that closely mimic the action of estrogen. But they did further studies that were able to rule that out, according to Lock, and so we're left with at least the possibility that it might have something to do with the fact that in Japan there's a different understanding of what it means to be an older woman, and that the body is listening to the culture.
I talk a lot about mind-body medicine in my recent article on the psychology of back pain.
Medicine & Health
Comments (4)
soy contains chemicals that closely mimic the action of estrogen. But they did further studies that were able to rule that out,
Soy was my guess right up until reading the above. Perhaps it is something genetic, but since their diet seems quite different from ours, perhaps it is something epigenetic? I have seen fascinating research on the fact that you can take identical twins and end up with 2 very different people due to diet and environmental circumstances. The epigenome seems as important as the genome!
Dave Briggs :~)
Posted by: Dave Briggs | February 4, 2008 1:18 PM