Talk:Psychosomatic medicine

message: Looking to edit this page for a class assignment, and was thinking of using the sources as follows: Some sources I have gathered based on my topic thus far include: - Personality: Classic Theories and Modern Research, 6th ed. by Howard S. Friedman and Miriam W. Schustack -https://www.clpsychiatry.org (the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine) - Psychosomatic Medicine, edited by Kurt D. Ackerman and Andrea F. Dimartini - Psychosomatic Medicine: An Introduction to Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry, edited by James J. Amos and Robert G. Robinson -https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/professional-interests/consultation-liaison-psychiatry==Psychosomatic cf. Psychogenic==  Bail2 (talk) 01:20, 2 March 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: This paragraph:
"Psychosomatic symptoms show that a human body can create physical symptoms that compensate for relationship deficiencies. (For example, hypnosis-induced allergic reactions indicate that a person's immune response can dramatically change during an intense relationship)."
Makes a conclusion.  It states that because symptoms manifest we can conclude the cause is "the human body has created physical symtoms."  May I point out, this article is about psycho-somatic.  A statement that says, "the human body injures itself" may be a perfectly fine, wonderful statement.  But that statement is not cited, that statement is poorly worded and is difficult to glean meaning from and probably, that statement belongs deeper into the article under a subheading something like, "There are no psychosomantic illnesses, instead, the body hurts itself.  So, I'm going to remove that portion to this page unless someone discusses and cites how "Body hurts itself" is germane to "psychosomatic". Terryeo 00:54, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  going to remove a nonesense paragraph 

message: "They also claim to cure arthritis, radiation poisoning, cancer,  and, according to a 1995 brochure, "70 percent of Man's illnesses". " is so completely untrue that it is laughable.  To only quote a second party source which gives an opinion about what the source opinionates is laughable.  I this case it is also untrue.  Dianetics doesn't claim to cure physical ills.  The Dianetics site takes particular care to be very sure they make no such claim or implication.  The E-Meter court fiassco, years ago, made sure Dianetics makes no such public claims. Why not find a quote where they claim the moon is made of green cheese?  heh !Terryeo 21:13, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  removed dianetics allegation 

message: Should we really mention Scientology in this page? It isn't necessary, none of the methods scientology use have any basis in science (ironic, considering their name) and they are actually opposed to psychiatry.
: It is entertaining to watch two competing quackeries wrestle with each other. Nicmart (talk) 15:57, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scientology? 

message: Is it psychosomatic if it's caused entirely by one's thinking, attitude, or emotions? Or is the psychological aspect just one factor?
:A disorder that involves both mind and body is called a psychosomatic illness. In other words, the illness may be emotional or mental in origin but have physical symptoms. Psychosomatic illnesses are not imaginary. They are physical disorders in which both emotions and thought patterns are believed to play a central role, and usually develop when a person's disease-fighting ability is weakened due to stress. After a particularly stressful event, like the loss of a loved one, for example, an individual might develop high blood pressure shortly afterward or even have a heart attack. In another person, the same situation might lead to a peptic ulcer or a series of asthma attacks. A third individual, equally as grief-stricken, might not get sick at all. For a psychosomatic illness to occur, a person must first be vulnerable in a particular body system. 
The above quote implies that a physical disorder can be caused in part by emotions and thought patterns. --Wing Nut 19:42, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Refining the definition

message: I don't believe that these should be categorized as psychosomatic.  I think they are better categorized as neuroses, but I expect that the psychologists have more specific, somewhat different categories for them.  The reason I don't think they are psychosomatic is that, as I understand it, psychosomatic illnesses create symptoms of real degenerative processes in the body, whereas anorexia and bulemia create actions by the individual against their own body.  The psychosomatic process is covert and the anorexic / bulemic actions are overt.  The a / b patient overtly witholds food or induces regurgitation. 68.164.88.178 09:55, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anorexia and Bulemia 

message: The history section needs some serious attention. No mention of Freud, Neurasthenia, Charcot, or of doctors' views on the causes of psychosomatic illness (the uterus in hysteria, reflexology, magnetism, etc.) and the legion of quacks who tried (and succeeded) in curing psychosomatic patients from the 18th century to the present day. I don't have time to do this right now, but if anyone else wants to make some contributions please go ahead.
For anyone interested in the history of psychosomatic illness I would strongly recommend Shorter's "From Paralysis to Fatigue: a History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era". In fact, that is the only good book on psychsomatic illness that seems to be out there.
--Sciencewatcher 22:55, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: A more modern work that references and builds on Shorter's work is Dr. John E. Sarno's recent book (2006), "The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders" .  Dr. Sarno is a pioneer at diagnosing and successfully treating many modern ills as psychosomatic or psychogenic, particularly chronic back pain, tendonitis, RSI, and fibromyalgia, in his more than three decades at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, where he is still practicing at age 83.  He is also a Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at the NYU School of Medicine, and the author of other books, including "Healing Back Pain: The Mind-body Connection," (1991) , and "The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body Healing the Pain" (1998).  Ralphyde 00:39, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  History 

message: I've heard of him described as the "father of psychosomatic medicine"...
Critic9328 21:13, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  No mention of (Georg) Groddeck? 

message: Much of the 'History' section of this article appears to have been taken, almost word for word, from this web page from the NLM titled: Psychosomatic Medicine: "The Puzzling Leap". That website requests that "National Library of Medicine (NLM) be given appropriate acknowledgement" if the text is used elsewhere. — BillC  talk 21:20, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: National Library of Medicine

message: Starting with this: "There is also a probable psychological influence in the development and outcome of conditions such as migraines." This is not only unproven but unaccepted by leading neurologists. While Wikipedia entries on physics and other hard sciences tend to be quite good, anything to do with psychiatry is a heap of conjecture and outright quackery. 68.58.2.232 (talk) 15:05, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  What a crock! 

message: Power of suggestion currently redirects here to psychosomatic medicine.  While there is a brief mentioning of using suggestion by an authority figure to help alleviate psychosomatic symptoms, it would seem much more appropriate to redirect that to the general Suggestion page.Mmortal03 (talk) 04:19, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Power of suggestion

message: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is listed here as a psychosomatic illness. There is a growing mountain of evidence that it is purely physiological in cause and cure. It is possible that stress may contribute but that can be said of many illnesses. 
Indeed, the suggestion by psychiatrists for the last 20 years that M.E. is psychological, may turn out to be one of the greatest malpractices of modern medicine. Where is the critical concession that many psychosomatic illness have turned out to be physiological ?  
To keep a consistent tone, I invite one of the regular authors of this topic to make the corrections suggested by at least removing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome from the list.
--X86dude (talk) 06:25, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  M.E. (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) is not psychosomatic. 

message: Under the header Treatment, it reads: "Unlike hypochondria (which some mistakenly think is the same thing as psychosomatic illness), sufferers of a psychosomatic illness are experiencing real pain, real nausea, or other real physically felt symptoms, but with no cause that can be diagnosed."
According to the DSM-IV-TR, hypochondriasis is a somatoform disorder, which is itself a type of psychosomatic disorder. Therefore, hypochondriasis is a psychosomatic disorder. Since there's no source for the initial clause in the sentence quoted above, I'm removing it immediately. svadhisthana (talk) 18:16, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Hypochondriasis is a psychosomatic disorder

message: "Including, but not limited to" is lawyer-speak and is unnecessary since "including" implies additional items already. --Unimath (talk) 12:34, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  including, but not limited to 

message: I don't have any references for this issue, so I'm raising it on the talk page in the hope that some might be found.
The "it's all in your head" dismissal is very harmful because it is unfalsifiable.  There are symptoms, the patient is told that they are lying, imagining it, or bringing it upon themselves with negative thoughts.  There is no differential diagnosis, because the diagnosis of psychosomatic (or somatoform, or malingering...) is leapt to.  Since the illness is not dealt with, the symptoms continue, which is taken as evidence that the patient has persisted in their pesky self-harm-via-thought.
I recall a time when I went to my GP with cramps.  One would presume that he might start with the assumption that I had cramps, go through some sort of differential diagnosis to work out the cause and a sensible path forward.  Instead, I made the mistake of suggesting what I thought the cause might be.  His response was a cunty "I wonder whether you had them before you read about that."  He wrote out my regular prescriptions, and the consultation ended.  He didn't even check that I'd learnt that particular cause of low electrolytes before my cramps started or not.  He just decided it was definitely psychosomatic, and abandoned me to my cramps --- which did actually continue until I removed that cause.
I'm pretty sure that's not a rare occurrence: the fact that a patient suggests a diagnosis is taken as evidence for an alternative diagnosis of "it's all in your head".  This creates a perverse situation where an ignorant patient is treated properly, but a well-read patient is abandoned to their painful symptoms with no further investigation.
Hopefully someone has looked into this somewhere.  Correctrix (talk) 04:54, 23 July 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: You might want to look into the work of Brian Hughes, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Galway, Ireland. He has written several books that seem to (I haven't read them) address this topic, among them Rethinking Psychology: Good Science, Bad Science, Pseudoscience (2016) and Psychology in Crisis (2018). He also has a blog. 79.201.169.224 (talk) 07:46, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Psychosomatic medicine as dismissal 

message: (Comment simultaneously posted on the three relevant talk pages.)
There appears to be a disconnect between the definition of "psychosomatic" in use for the Psychogenic disease, Psychosomatic medicine, and Somatic symptom disorder pages.
Psychogenic disease describes it as "illnesses with a known medical cause where psychological factors may nonetheless play a role (e.g., asthma can be exacerbated by anxiety)."
Somatic symptom disorder, which is the redirect for "psychosomatic," doesn't directly reference the word at all in the body of the article, but if we assume from the redirect that the two words are implied to be synonymous, it is "any mental disorder that manifests as physical symptoms that suggest illness or injury, but cannot be explained fully by a general medical condition or by the direct effect of a substance, and are not attributable to another mental disorder (e.g., panic disorder)." Already, these two conflict.
Psychosomatic medicine corroborates the definition used in Psychogenic illness, saying "in contemporary psychosomatic medicine, the term is normally restricted to those illnesses that do have a clear physical basis, but where it is believed that psychological and mental factors also play a role." But it further states that "psychiatry traditionally distinguishes between psychosomatic disorders, disorders in which mental factors play a significant role in the development, expression, or resolution of a physical illness, and somatoform disorders, disorders in which mental factors are the sole cause of a physical illness."
It also appears to use the terms "psychosomatic" and "psychogenic" interchangeably (or without a clarified distinction) without linking to Psychogenic disease.
As Somatic symptom disorder is the redirect for somatoform disorder, this now means Psychosomatic medicine claims two of its redirects are distinct concepts.
This appears to be a tangle in need of cleaning up and I do not know how to approach it. Aliengeometries (talk) 05:50, 13 September 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition of "psychosomatic" across pages