Great news from Nick Taliesin Barrett: “The Condition” has been diagnosed. It seems to be a variant of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, considered “the world’s most common functional gastrointestinal disorder”.

Let’s hope that the treatment will be successful. One of the interesting things about many disorders with a strong psychosomatic component (some would argue that nearly all disorders have such a component) is that both positive and negative factors have positive feedback. In other words, while stress will make the disorder much worse, thereby triggering a runaway cycle of more stress/more problems, appropriate therapy can be equally self-reinforcing.

Here’s the link I sent to Nick a week or so ago. My attention was triggered by the sentence:

Serotonin (5-HT) is a naturally occurring neurotransmitter and signaling molecule. Ninety-five percent of all serotonin is localized in the GI tract where it plays a key role in the motor, sensory and secretory functions of the gut. For some time, scientists have suspected that alterations in serotonin may contribute to abnormal conditions in the GI tract.

So that’s why we say “gut feeling”…