Posted by Jack (167.206.58.39) on January 22, 2000 at 20:53:41:
Let me offer this regarding the premise that psychology/emotions affect intensity/duration/frequency of clusters.
The evidence that we have from people is so anecdotal as to be kind of useless. We get this kind of stuff:
My last cycle was kind of long because I was under a lot of stress at work.
My cycle 2 years ago was real bad because my husband lost his job.
etc, etc.
This is not science. Stress and life events are always changing. To prove that they really affected one's cycle would take some real hard controlled clinical studies.
The reason we go there ( including this jerk ) in the first place is because we have a bias in that direction. I absolutely know that if I did not have clusters and someone told me about this condition I would think that they had severe emotional problems and this was simply a manifestation of those problems.
Having said all of this crap I will also say that I am willing to concede that clusters MAY be entirely due to psychology/emotions both as a root cause and/or as afecting requency/intensity/duration. It is also absolutely apparent to me that we have not proven that and that we have a natural bias to think that.
One last thought :
Schizophrenia was once thought to be the result of poor mothering and all those poor mothers with schizophrenic children internalized this thought and were absolutely sure they had created these mentally ill children. They could probably point to specific behaviors that they had engaged in. Well we now know that it is a purely physical condition and that nurture has no effect. Oops.
Ulcers were once thought to be a result of stress. Wrong - we now know that they are the result of an organism that we pass around. It is an infection. Before we new this all the poor slobs with ulcers had internalized the old science and believed that it was their jobs, or their marriage, or the kids, blah, blah blah. They were absolutely sure. Wrong.