Speed Up Wound-healing With Expressive Writing

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Claudia Hammond talks to Kavita Bedhara about a new study which shows that simply writing about how you feel can speed up wound healing. Although this effect has been known since James Pennebaker's landmark studies in the 1980's, this latest study is the first to demonstrate that expressive writing after an injury can aid healing as much as doing it in advance of a wound. Germany has welcomed many hundreds of thousands of refugees into the country over the last few years – among them pregnant women who face the challenge of giving birth in a new country. Many of them do not speak the language. One voluntary organisation ‘Welcome Mamas’ is matching German women with refugee mothers so they can help them to access doctors’ appointments and vaccinations An association has been found between the “body clock” variations in brain-injured patients and their levels of consciousness. A new study published in Neurology suggests that the closer the body temperature patterns were to those of healthy people, the better they scored on tests of consciousness. These results could point to the importance of light and darkness at the right time of day in places where brain injured patients are looked after. (Photo credit: Getty Images)