I'm really looking forward to reading Anne Harrington's new book on the history of mind-body medicine. I thought this factoid, from her interview with the Boston Globe Ideas section, was quite interesting:
IDEAS: One of the things I learned reading the book is that there's no word for "hot flashes" in Japanese because menopausal women there don't get them.
HARRINGTON: This is the work of an anthropologist named Margaret Lock, who looked at older Japanese women and found that this very common symptom of menopause in Western countries didn't seem to be widely known in Japan.
IDEAS: How does she explain that?
HARRINGTON: Some people said maybe this really has to do with the fact that they eat a lot more soy, and we know that soy contains chemicals that closely mimic the action of estrogen. But they did further studies that were able to rule that out, according to Lock, and so we're left with at least the possibility that it might have something to do with the fact that in Japan there's a different understanding of what it means to be an older woman, and that the body is listening to the culture.
I talk a lot about mind-body medicine in my recent article on the psychology of back pain.
soy contains chemicals that closely mimic the action of estrogen. But they did further studies that were able to rule that out,
Soy was my guess right up until reading the above. Perhaps it is something genetic, but since their diet seems quite different from ours, perhaps it is something epigenetic? I have seen fascinating research on the fact that you can take identical twins and end up with 2 very different people due to diet and environmental circumstances. The epigenome seems as important as the genome!
Dave Briggs :~)
It's not true that there is no word for "hot flashes" in Japanese. The phenomenon exists, it is associated with menopause, and there is both a noun (nobose) and verb (noboseru) to describe it.
My own middle-aged wife has never experienced it, but some of her acquaintances have. She notes that most of them are overweight, which in itself is not as common in Japan as elsewhere.
I concur with Tenga above: the phenomenon certainly exists here as well, it's just that nobody has bothered to create an expression specifically to describe it. It's kind of like saying that because there's no specific word or expression in English for the ache some people get at the muscle along the mid-bottom of your feet when they spend a whole day walking, that that pain doesn't exist.
It sounds reasonable that the reason it is unusual here has to do with overall lifestyle and diet - comparatively few people are overweight, a diet rich in vegetables and fish - rather than one single magic ingredient.
Thanks so much for your illuminating comments. I haven't read the book yet, but I'll report back on how Harrington characterizes this research in the text.