In October 2021, as I was beginning preparations for making holiday chocolates for my small business, I gradually developed pain in my right hand, the hand I use most in the process of creating chocolates. It was very scary. I wrote to all on my customer list explaining that I would not be able to make as many Christmas chocolates as usual. I went to my primary care physician, and of course he gave a probable diagnosis of carpal tunnel syndrome. In spite of my mentions of stress as a factor in many diseases in our encounters, he always ignores me and heads for his arsenal of physical diagnoses. But I knew that CTS is a common diagnosis for what is actually TMS. To state the obvious, it is very difficult to move forward with trying to treat symptoms as psychogenic when every word you hear or read says otherwise. To cite one small example: I went to the farmers' market to buy bread and mentioned my symptoms to the two bakers (since they asked about Christmas chocolates). In unison, they said they both had had CTS, had the surgery, and were cured. Get the surgery! they advised. But I persevered in what I believed was the true diagnosis (it was a fairly easy connection to make: extreme stress over making several thousand chocolates by myself and terrible pain in the most crucial part of my body for the endeavor).
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. I still haven't figured out how bookmark links work in different scenarios, but in this case I will just eliminate that sentence since it's not needed.