To Blog is to Heal??

Ok so this is interesting. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association has shown that 'writing' can alleviate some of the physical symptoms of disease. The study, led by Joshua M. Smyth, professor of psychology at North Dakota State University in Fargo, was centred on 112 men and women with asthma or rheumatoid arthritis. One group of patients was asked to write about the most stressful event in their lives, while a control group was asked to write about emotionally neutral topics for 20 minutes on three consecutive days.

At the four-month checkup it was discovered that asthma patients in the experimental group showed improvements of 19 per cent in lung function, while the control group experienced no change. Rheumatoid arthritis patients in the experimental group showed a reduction in disease severity of 28 per cent, compared to no change in the control group. Overall, 47 per cent of the experimental patients had what Smyth describes as a clinically relevant improvement in symptoms. Now he's trying to determine why patients were helped by writing, and speculates that writing about traumatic events may have helped patients to finally deal with and accept tragedies that had been causing stress and sleeplessness. By altering the physiological stress patterns in their bodies, their health improved.

Ok, makes sense and that's great news for bloggers. Not only am I having fun blogging, I'm creating a positive effect on my well-being. To blog is to heal. I wonder if people with psychological issues are more drawn to blogging than mentally healthy people. Hmmm....