Saturday, August 1, 2015

BROKEN HEART

     We often talk about how some one broke up relations with some one and broke his or her heart. In that sense we feel that the 'emotions' come from or originate in heart. In reality all the emotions come from brain. But some how we attribute the heart as the site of 'love' and 'feeling'. Even when we talk about various "Chakras" in the the Hindu philosophy, we talk about lower Chakras and the the 'highest ' Chakra. The lowest is located at coccygeal level , then the next one at sacral and then at  Lumbar level and so on . The one situated at the level of the heart is considered at the higher level than the coccygeal level. When I explain the improvement in our 'goals' that occur in our thinking , with the practice of the meditation,we often say that the attention towards the procreation or excretion or even hunger, is inferior to the attachment that we have with heart. So our term of the broken heart is emotional one . But what I am about to say has nothing to do with this conventional 'broken heart'. But it has to do with medical condition called broken heat syndrome.
     So let me tell you a story about the broken heart patient that talked to recently. She is lady that know for long time . She is about 62 years old and has no major medical history. She goes to Gym and does lot of weight training and also does power walk, sometimes as much as 5 miles. Her brother ,who is well educated lost his job and could not find full time job . So he moved in with her and then after a while got part time job. One day when this lady came home late , she could not find her brother in his room and the car was still in the drive way.So when she looked for him , she found out that he had shot himself and committed suicide. So the next day her all relatives came home. The very next day or so at night she woke up and could not breath. She was feeling pressure on her chest and started coughing clear sputum. So she woke her family as one of them was a cardiologist . The called 911 and then she went to ER. Further work up showed up that she had congestive heart failure and her blood test for heart attack was positive . The cardiologist was consulted and they did the Echo cardiogram and it showed that the pumping action of her heart was reduced to 25%. This was completely unexplainable and so they decided to do a cardiac cauterisation to find out if she had any blockages in the coronaries. The heart cath showed that coronaries were 'clean' and there were no blockages. She was improving and was sent home . HER DIAGNOSIS WAS 'BROKEN HEART SYNDROME' .
       So this as also called Takotsubo disease. This usually is preceded by EMOTIONAL event , like in this case her brother had committed suicide. The emotions cause (may be ) spasm of the coronaries and this leads to some release of the enzymes , which leads to positive blood test for the heart attack. The spasm of the coronaries leads to weakening of the heart muscles, but there is no long term damage. Most of the patients recover in short time , in a week to few weeks.
      So emotions DO trigger a heart weakness .So may be HEART is real location of EMOTIONS and not the brain after all.  

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