Medically unexplained physical symptoms

Somatic Symptom Disorder (SSD) embodies the conundrum of compartmentalizing mental disorders as separate from physical, emotional and spiritual ailments. The number of individuals presenting for treatment of somatic symptoms associated with mental duress is enormous (Sharma & Manjula, 2013). They suffer high disability, marked impairment of health status, and place massive financial burden on the health care system (APA, 2013; Ruttley, Ng & Burnside, 2014; Sharma & Manjula, 2013). Approximately half of patients present to caregivers with somatic complaints, of which a third cannot be explained by a medical condition (Sharma & Manjula, 2013). Individuals suffering from somatic symptoms report extreme dissatisfaction with primary, secondary…

3 The difficulty in managing these patients is that they are often examined thoroughly for a medical cause initially and when none is found, patients can often feel dismissed when the discussion of psychological intervention arises.1 This presentation to the General practitioner initially with somatoform disorder and medically unexplained symptoms can present lots of challenges for the patient and for the GP alike. 4The GP plays an essential role in the successful management of these conditions…

Functional Movement Disorders have been prevalent in the healthcare community for many years making up 16% of patients referred to a neurologic clinic.1 However, this group of neurological disorders has undergone numerous name changes, which has created confusion on the appropriate terms and defining factors. When healthcare professionals cannot agree on a common definition for a condition, it demonstrates a lack of understanding for the pathology. Functional Movement Disorders share the same…

One on a single woman and one on a married man. Even though they have done extensive research this is still an ongoing problem that has no clear explanation. In the article it talks about psychosomatic illnesses, and that there is no single solution for this illness. Psychosomatic disorders or illnesses are physical symptoms that mask emotional distress. The physical symptoms hide the emotional distress, so in nature it causes someone to seek medical attention, thinking they have something…

two specific thyroid hormones, triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4), and secrete calcitonin that circulates continuously from the gland through the blood to all parts of the body. In fact, thyroid hormones are essential for operating “almost all the cells in the body, regulating basal metabolic rate, lipid metabolism, body temperature, carbohydrate metabolism, and all aspects of linear growth” (Burkhart 55). The pituitary produces the hormone thyrotropin, which is commonly known as the…

Yzermans, Donker, & Vasterman (2004) revealed that 30 months after the explosion of a European factory in 2000, “victims showed high levels of medically unexplained physical symptoms, including gastrointestinal problems” (as cited in Martin, 2006, p. 3). Moreover, after hurricane Sandy, the Mental Health Association of Nebraska (2012) discovered that a full year after the storm, doctors continued to see many people with storm-related medical symptoms. “Common health complaints were headaches,…

But just as the liberal use of opioids took hold, chronic pain was also on the rise, fueled by joint-grinding obesity, physical inactivity, diabetic neuropathy, sports injuries, and the graying of the population. As important as those trends was a newfound respect for a phenomenon that had been held in contempt during the century-long rise of scientific medicine: the existence of symptoms without disease. The aches and pains that practitioners might once have attributed to hypochondria,…

A number of simple formulas, which to begin with seemed to meet our needs, have later turned out to be inadequate….Here, when we are dealing with anxiety, you see everything in a state of flux and change.” By the 1890s, Freud had come to believe that the symptoms displayed by many of his patients were the product, not of disease of the physical nervous system, but rather of their failure to deal with invisible, unconscious and primarily sexual, psychological drives. This insight became the…