[reverett123]

Now, this is impressive!

From this morning's Daily Mail:

".....Skin healed three times faster in people who wrote about their traumatic life experiences, compared with those who simply documented daily activities, in a study by the University of Auckland.

The 50 participants, both men and women, were asked to write for 20 minutes daily, for three consecutive days.

Half the group wrote about upsetting experiences and expressed their deepest emotions, while the rest wrote about their planned activities for the next day, without mentioning emotions.

Two weeks later, all participants had a 4mm skin biopsy taken from their arm and their healing rates were monitored and compared.

After 11 days, 76 per cent of the expressive group’s wounds had healed, compared with just 42 per cent of the others.

‘Our study helps demonstrate the mind-body relationship and how we could use psychological interventions to improve physiological outcomes,’ says Dr Elizabeth Broadbent, who led the study...."

[GerryW]

Fascinating. Sometimes the body doesn't heal but gets worse in some diseases with which we are all familiar. Would blogging hasten their progression or slow them down? Maybe it only affects wounds.

[Muireann]

'Blogging' refers to writing and publishing on the www. It's short for 'web log'. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog and this is not what these study participants were asked to do. Their actions were closer to writing a private diary/journaling.

Sorry Rick, but I think accuracy is called for in these reports just as much as in drug trials. Openly emoting on the www about either our literal or metaphorical wounds might have an entirely different effect.