ABSTRACT
I n the movies and on television, it often seems that a heart attack usually occurs in a harried, overworked 60 year old executive who has just flown into a rage at one of his colleagues. Another popular variation is to have an attack occur during a heated argument with a family member. The message to the public is that somehow one or both of these stressful situations precipitated the heart attack. For many years physicians scoffed
at this impression. We are now having second thoughts. Dr. Jam es Muller of Harvard Medical School is one investigator who believes that there are a variety of factors that can “ trigger” heart attacks and that “ stress” can be one of them. We will discuss this more fully in Chapter 11, when we consider heart attacks in detail. In this chapter, we want to concentrate on stress itself. Does it play a role in the “ mind-body connection” that Bill Moyers popularized in a 1993 PBS series, but to which many have alluded for years? What is stress, anyway?
