ABSTRACT
"Stress" refers to the biological and psychological response to a stressor. The General Adaptation Syndrome provides an accurate general description although the true stress response embraces a multitude of intervening psychological and biological factors. Time seems to be a particularly important factor in whether or not a stressor ultimately produces a stress response. The presence of social mediators in the stress-illness paradigm will mitigate the threatening nature of a stressor and reduce or short-circuit a stress response. The complexity of the stress response makes it seem almost impossible to generate a theory that will cover all the important aspects of stress-illness relationships. S. R. Burchfield has made an elegant attempt to integrate this diversity into a stress-response theory. A. Antonovsky, whose theory of health maintenance is based on a sense of "coherence" with one's environment, offered several guidelines for avoiding common pitfalls in medical care.
