Some unexplained physical symptoms may be caused by unresolved emotional trauma

I'm not impuning the conclusion but the awful logic used to reach it. This is tentamount to saying, "a good meal of delicious food can lift one's spirits, therefore eating a rich diet everyday will make one happy!"

Unless looked at Dianetics at all, and it's historical weirdness, I'm going to refer to your response as 'glib' if anything.

If you did, you'd see there are glaringly obvious relationship between what is discussed in the article, and the basis of Dianetics; not just 'similar' they are effectively describing the same thing.

" resemble something else that has been debunked aren't part of that."

'Dianetics' has not been debunked so much as it hasn't been studied because it's full of all sorts of things that don't make sense (it would be pointless). But - there are some interesting and possibly valid points in there, for example - the idea described in this article. And consider that everything in psychology seems to be 'debunked' as we still don't have a good framework for understanding the human mind. To boot - most psychological 'science' can't even be reproduced in 2018. And I literally mean most [1].

Dianetics is mostly nutbars, but the similarity between what is described in the article, and what was popularized by Dianetics long ago is not superficial, it's quite strong. It doesn't matter that L Ron Hubbard was a hustler.

[1] https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-...

In vipassana meditation the meditator focuses on sensations on the body from head to toe, systematically moving down top to bottom and noticing the sensations in each part - head, eyes, ears, nose, shoulders etc. when thoughts arise you notice the sensations they create and over time you develop a map of thoughts to sensations. as you meditate some past traumatic experiences may arise and you may start to mentally react to it, but you notice that thinking about that particular insult from the past may just be causing this discofmrting sensation in some part of the body and you are reacting to the discmfort/pain caused by that. by training your mind to maintain equanimity, you realize that all these thoughts are doing is creating a sensation and causing you to react, and over time you can become a little more detached to it. what is weird though about these sensations though is that there might be these knots tied up in your chest, and by focusing on the pain of these knots you start to release a lot of old memories that caused you some kind of pain in the past. the pain of those memories are stored as sensations in the body. if your in a bad situation in your life mentally and psychologically it will absolutely manifest itself in terms of physical symptoms. additionally I have found that the combination of meditation and any kind of drugs - marijuana or psychedelics can cause of a lot of that trauma to be released.

I’ve been testing this hypothesis - as best as one possibly can without conventional medical support - for the past few years.

I’ve found that with persistence, emotion-based therapies are effective at bringing about healing of chronic physiological illnesses.

Prior to that I’d spent several frustrating years seeking diagnosis for conditions that were debilitating but not apparently identifiable or treatable.

To me they manifested as chronic muscle and joint pain, digestive issues, fatigue/lethargy, skin conditions, signs of inflammation. Medical tests found only mild deficiencies of Vitamin D and iron, with recommendations to treat with diet or supplements but otherwise nothing wrong. Yet the pain and fatigue was debilitating and made it impossible to live a normal life.

In desperation I turned to unconventional therapies and came across a set of techniques that seek to identify and resolve traumas/complexes/phobias stuck in the subconscious mind.

I’ve been undertaking these practices consistently for about 6-7 years now, and slowly but surely my symptoms are subsiding and all aspects of my life are improving.

Why does has it taken so long?

It turns out there was a huge amount of emotional baggage to work through. Not obvious stuff like childhood abuse; just a lot of unpleasant experiences that began from being an anxious child, and snowballed as life progressed.

I’ve now worked through several thousand instances of trauma from throughout my life. Much of it is minor or seemingly trivial, and some of it is profound, but it all seems to play a role, and the process of identifying/understanding/resolving it is directly correlated with the alleviation of my symptoms.

I’m now quite certain that this concept would have a huge impact on the medical world if it were to be embraced by the mainstream, but there’s huge resistance to it so it seems set to remain confined to the fringes for a long time to come.

Recently there's been coverage (on HN [1] and elsewhere [2]) of Dr. Gabor Maté, a veteran physician who has studied the role of trauma in addiction and chronic illness. He advocates the position that there is near enough to a perfect correlation between chronic illness or addiction and trauma. From my own experience and from what I've observed in other people I know, this rings true.

I'm not sure what it will take for this notion to be embraced more widely and researched more deeply, but it seems pretty important.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497985

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUGGNPAK6uw