Many inaccurate ideas about illnesses and medicines become popularly believed. Sometimes, these misunderstandings result from personal biases or a lack of scientific information (like believing that Schizophrenia is a manifestation of a person being spiritually possessed.) Not uncommonly, the distorted belief is the result of having some information but not enough to adequately and accurately explain what is happening.
Sometimes, people just persist in believing what it is they believe without any supportive evidence. Belief is not infrequently confused with knowledge.
When it comes to the conditions we refer to as being “Psychosomatic,” misunderstandings abound in the general population for all of the reasons mentioned above. This article presents a straightforward clarification of what a Psychosomatic condition really is and the importance of treating the very real physical symptoms.
In medicine, the psychosomatic approach connotes a way of looking at illness through an interdisciplinary approach that takes into account the relationships of social, psychological and behavioral factors on physical issues. It is a field of practice that assumes that the mind and body are functionally inseparable and that the one always impacts the other.
When it comes to physical symptoms, ones designated as being psychosomatic are ones which appear to have developed in reaction to mental or psychological situations. This one piece of information seems to have given rise to a common but inaccurate belief that because a symptom (pain, etc.) develops because of a psychological stressor of some kind, that the pain is somehow not “real.”
In fact, no matter what the etiology (the cause) of the symptom, it is quite real to the person and frequently requires treatment.
The seminal works on the subject of Psychosomatic Medicine by Dr. Helen Flanders Dunbar, were published between 1935 and 1949 and remain important cornerstones of contemporary understanding of these conditions. In her most widely read and influential book, “Mind and Body” published in 1947, Dr. Dunbar details specific examples of how some psychological issues become physically symptomatic.
Even as Dr. Dunbar presents her ideas about the ways in which physical problems can symbolically express mental discomforts, she does not demean the severity of those symptoms or the need to treat them.
For example, at one point she suggests that the medical condition we call asthma may, at times, be a psychosomatic expression of a person who feels somehow trapped and “just can’t breathe in here,” or that numbing of the hands may metaphorically express a person’s feeling that they are “losing their grip.” Whether asthma is caused by a fear or by atmospheric contaminants, it requires treatment to help the person be able to breathe better in the short run.
When the specific physical manifestation is pain and that pain seems to have been caused by psychological factors, the specific psychosomatic issue is called “Psychalgia.” This is probably the best known of these psychogenically induced physical problems.
There are many stories, popularized in the entertainment media, about people who have had a limb amputated continuing to feel what is called “phantom pain” in it. Conventional wisdom has come to assume that because there is no limb, the pain must be imaginary and, therefore, does not require any medical intervention.
Modern scientific investigation tells us otherwise. The nerve connections remaining in the human body that go from the brain toward the location of the absent body part are still active and can, most certainly, still experience real pain. To believe otherwise and to not treat that pain as one would any other, is both ignorant and cruel.
Psychosomatic illnesses, generally speaking, therefore require two types of treatment concurrently. 1) Medical help to remediate or contain the physical symptoms and 2) Psychological help to address the underlying root causes of the problem. To provide one without the other is to only treat half of the problem.
The idea that “Psychosomatic” means “all in the mind” is misguided and can lead to a denial of necessary medical care. The mind may be where something began but once it blooms as a physical problem or symptom it is no longer fully contained by the mind. It has become a reality in the body and needs be acknowledged and treated as such.