Psychosomatic Blindness in Cambodian Women
Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2020 7:06 am
By Dr Joe Dispenza
The damage caused by the Khmer Rouge lasted long after the group was overthrown. Survivors were forced to live with the memories of what happened both to themselves and their loved ones
This trauma showed up in unexpected ways. In the mid 1980’s Dr. Gretchen van Boemel, then with the Doheny Eye Institute in Los Angeles, started seeing patients with an unusually high number of vision problems. These patients were all women between the ages of 40-60 and they were all Cambodian.
Various tests and scans were performed on the women. The results showed near perfect visual acuity even though most measured as legally blind when they tried to read an eye chart.
A deeper analysis showed that 90% of these women had lost family members and 70% witnessed a family member being brutally killed. In addition, many of the women were raped, beaten or subjected to starvation.
In interviews with these women, many said they spent their days at home reliving their nightmarish experience. Why were these women unable to heal and create a new life for themselves? Think of a skipping CD. The groove worn into the disc prevents the song from progressing. A traumatic experience operates much the same way. By remembering the same event over and over again, these women fired and wired the same circuits in the same ways, which altered their brain circuitry. They also reproduced the same chemical emotions that, over time, began to change their brains and their bodies. The event and the continual torment of those memories created physical changes in their biology, not in their eyes, but most likely in their brains.
https://drjoedispenza.net/blog/health/y ... blindness/
Cambodians’ Vision Loss Linked to War Trauma
By LEE SIEGEL
OCT. 15, 1989
Scores of Cambodians complain they are blind or suffer blurry vision although their eyes are normal--a malady some experts blame on the horrors they witnessed in the killing fields of their native land.
Experts believe that the refugees suffer hysterical, psychosomatic or functional blindness, in which psychological turmoil spurs people with normal eyes to believe that they are blind or see poorly.
Hysterical blindness has been reported among shellshocked soldiers during World War I, children of divorced parents and people involved in traffic accidents.
Five years ago, an unusual number of female Cambodian refugees with psychosomatic vision problems were noticed by Gretchen Van Boemel, an electrophysiologist at Doheny Eye Institute in Los Angeles.
full.https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm ... story.html
