I ended up teaching several courses that had I been asked in graduate school, "Would you be interested in teaching this course?" I would have adamantly responded, "Not only, "No, but h... no!" One of the courses I got to teach that surprised me the most was Community and Public Health.  It blended a lot of what I had learned and it forced me to learn a lot of what I had failed to learn.  It turned out the latter was as fascinating as the former.

One of the topics that fits here is "Feeling good and healing good go together."

I thought of this today (2013 Jan 15) as both Chris and I are recovering from departures from our normal healthy selves.  Chris has something bordering on the flu, but without the fever which she has been fighting for more than two weeks,and I am recovering from a combined colecystectomy (gall bladder removal) and appendectomy exactly one week ago.

I won't diverge here into why an older, mid-BMI, male, who exercises regularly, and eats a balanced diet with lots of fiber and little fat should have gall stones, even though the temptation is great to do so.

Instead, I will focus on an observation.  Last evening Chris rubbed my back after we watched an episode of "Dr. Who," and it felt, "Oh, so good."  I could feel the endorphins and enkephalins flowing.  I returned the favor.  Today, both she and I feel better.  I even repeated the "treatment" today on Chris, since she is not recovering as quickly as I am.  Today, fully a week before I should, I ran up stairs two steps at a time, like I normally do (yesterday before the treatment, I had to take them one at a time slowly) and otherwise felt perfectly normal.

So, here is the anecdotal observation and resulting question (which is where science often begins).  Does "feeling good help healing good?"  A quick search of the web revealed a number of quasi-relevant sites.  Most were promoting their own products.  However, one I ran across is particularly good, http://www.serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro04/web1/mbond.html.  I recommend this as a good introductory read if you are interested.

I also recall a number of scientific articles looking at this relationship, but I can't come up with them "on the run."  I will be on the lookout for them from now on.  If you know of any, feel free to add this as a comment to this page.  Let's see where this goes...

I'd like to develop a path for this if one is possible.

Here is the path with the major features:

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