Is pain a somatic symptom?
The grouping of symptoms into "somatic" or "physical" on the one hand and "mental", "somatoform", or "psychological" on the other are vestiges of an era in medicine when it seemed useful to divide all the phenomena of disease into two groups - one related to the soma and other to the psyche. Today, this division is becoming obsolete and is harmful. Obsolete, because we are discovering changes in the tissues or in biochemical and immunological functions of the body in people with mental disorders, and because psychological complaints are frequent in all physical illnesses. Harmful, because the labels "psychological", "psychogenic", or "somatoform" are so loaded with connotations of being simulations or complaints about nothing that patients are unlikely to recive the help they need.
Geneva University Department of Psychiatry, Hopitaux Universitaires de Geneve HUG, Geneve, Switzerland.
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Sartorius
D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D006801:Humans; D010146:Pain / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology*; D010147:Pain Measurement; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D012684:Sensory Thresholds / Q000502:physiology*; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013001:Somatoform Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology