(For the purposes of this article, when we use the term "stress," we actually mean cortisol, and not just a subjective sense of anxiety).
But even the term "stress" is divisive.
The use of the term "stress fracture" relieves the radiologist from committing himself to a more specific diagnosis of a fatigue or an insufficiency fracture.
Among clinicians, the term "stress" is generally taken as synonymous with psychological (exteroceptive) stress.
The term "stress" will be used here to refer to such terms and concepts as strain and pressure.
Among various definitions of the term "stress", a common denominator is that stress denotes any condition being a threat to homeostasis in a broad sense [ 20, 21].
In research on alcohol, drug, and psychiatric disorders, the term "stress" often is understood to indicate any experience denoting adversity (Dohrenwend 2000).
Patients used the term "stress" to describe their internal feelings of distress and attributed this stress to a range of factors or external stressors that were generally beyond their control.
With recent pushes toward the medical model in modern psychiatry, I wonder if the lines between the terms "stress," "fear," and "anxiety" will continue to blur.
Hans Selye, a Czech physician and biochemist at the University of Montreal, took these ideas further, introducing the term "stress" (borrowed from metallurgy) to describe the way trauma caused overactivity of the adrenal gland, and with it a disruption of bodily equilibrium.
