One day, I went to the dermatologist to have him analyze my hair loss, and he said, It's stress. And it was no use explaining that I am the least stressed person he has ever met. I work at what I love, I wake up whenever I want, I decide what I want to do, I have a wife who is a sweetheart and we never argue, my secretary takes care of everything for me... in short: I have no stress at all. But the dermatologist continued to think that the hair loss was due to stress and not testosterone.

Some time later, I went to the cardiologist to control my blood pressure, which was a little high, and he pontificated: It's stress. And it was no use explaining that my father had high blood pressure, so the first suspicion should be genetics. He continued to think it was the supposed stress.
On another occasion, I went to the gastroenterologist to see if we could locate the bacteria that I had certainly brought from my many trips to India and that was causing abdominal cramps. He told me: This is stress. And it was no use explaining that, with 25 years of traveling to the Himalayas, it was inevitable that I had brought bacteria, protozoa and a whole zoological garden of microorganisms different from ours. He continued to think that the cause was stress.

One day, I hurt my back practicing Aikido. I went to the orthopedist and, as soon as I declared that I had back pain, he told me, based on his experience: It's stress. And it was no use explaining that the cause had been trauma. He persisted in saying that, regardless of the impact on the vertebrae, stress was associated with back pain.

But the most incredible thing was when, years later, I went to the dentist with an abscess in a tooth and the dentist immediately said: It's stress. Recent studies have proven that stress triggers abscesses and all sorts of inflammations, including cancer, because it lowers the body's resistance.

What is the conclusion?
The conclusion of the cases above is that, whatever your problem, the trigger may have been stress. You may have viruses and bacilli in your body that would never create any problems if there was no decrease in immunological capacity due to stress. This is the case of the herpes virus, which is there quietly until you have an episode of stress: immediately the nasty blisters start to appear on the lips or on the genitals. You may have a genetic predisposition to cancer, but it would never develop if there was no decrease in the body's resistance.

From the pocket book Stress
Professor DeRose, Egrégora Books