ABSTRACT
There can be few people in the western world who have not heard of stress, or who have not occasionally described their day to a colleague or friend as ‘stressful’. Furthermore, stress cannot be dismissed as an irrelevant and minor side-effect of modern life, because, as we will learn in Part Four of this text, it has been linked to the onset of major disease and an overall increase in morbidity and mortality in vulnerable patients. Our first task, however, is to examine the basic nature of stress, so that we have a platform for discussion.
