Introduction
There are pains that cannot be completely attributed to organic causes. These pains are often wrongly dismissed as pure “imagination”. If people experience physical symptoms that cannot be explained even after extensive diagnostics, this is called a somatic disorder.
Diseases of this nature have been officially recognized since 1980 and require psychosomatic clarification and therapy. Besides pain, there are a number of other symptoms, such as nausea, dizziness, a feeling of pressure in the chest, high blood pressure, which can occur in the context of a somatic disorder. The underlying causes can be very different here.
Why can you feel pain that is not related to any disease?
In recent years, medicine has moved away from the original assumption that pain is always caused by tissue damage. Thus, the new definition of pain clearly emphasizes the psycho-emotional aspects of pain development and stresses that pain is a purely subjective feeling. Thus, the feeling of pain can also be a product of our psyche, i.e. it is created in our thoughts but can be perceived elsewhere in our body.
Such somatoform pain can be triggered by many factors in our lives. For example, depression is often accompanied by the development of somatic pain or other somatic disorders. The exact origin of this form of pain has not yet been clarified in detail. However, in the case of certain disorders, it is assumed that in childhood, links between physical pain experiences and certain behavioral patterns are formed, which later play a major role in the perception of pain and can thus lead to somatic pain.
Causes
Under the umbrella term of hypochondria, various clinical pictures are summarized, ranging from a pronounced health behavior and awareness to the so-called hypochondriac delusion. Hypochondria is often based on a pronounced fear of illness or being ill. Since these patients usually have a heightened conscious body awareness, they quickly attribute many normal perceptions, such as a slightly increased heart rate, to illness.
Depending on its extent, a hypochondriac disorder can have a major impact on the quality of life of those affected, as they become excessively preoccupied with disease and very often go to a doctor to rule out possible illness. As a result, the topic of illness can overshadow their entire everyday life and social interactions can be neglected. If a person is suspected of having hypochondria, the first step is to talk to a psychotherapist.
The treatment usually consists of cognitive behavioral therapy. Psychosomatic illnesses are symptoms caused by psychological stress or factors that have a considerable influence on the quality of life of the affected person. In most cases, psychosomatic disorders are the expression of unprocessed mental pain or other life experiences that are due to profound life events.
Such events can be, for example, the loss of a loved one or disregard for others. In most cases, psychosomatic pain is a chronic pain and is usually diagnosed as exclusionary, which means that all other possible causes of chronic pain are excluded first. The therapy of psychosomatic pain usually consists of psychotherapy, the aim of which is to identify and reduce the underlying inner conflict.
In addition to this, further therapy options such as relaxation techniques, movement, ergotherapy and social therapy are recommended. Phantom pain is a perception of pain in an amputated body part. This means that people who have had an arm amputated, for example, feel pain at the original location of the arm.
The perception of pain is here the pure product of the psyche. Phantom pain must be distinguished from residual limb pain, which corresponds to pain development in the permanent residual limb. The phenomenon of phantom sensation in an amputated limb occurs frequently, but it does not always have to be a sensation of pain; it is often described as pure tingling or itching.The exact cause of the phantom pain has not yet been sufficiently clarified, but an overreaction of the sensitive cerebral cortex is suspected, which is caused by the lack of sensory information.
The treatment of this clinical picture consists on the one hand of a drug therapy with antidepressants. However, other therapy options such as biofeedback or a so-called mirror therapy are gaining more and more popularity. In mirror therapy, the image of the healthy half of the body is projected onto the diseased side of the patient’s body by means of a mirror in the middle between the two limbs.
This optical stimulus evokes memories of the former body part in the brain. This triggers reactions that suppress the phantom pain. This topic might also be of interest to you: Amputation – What you need to knowAs described in more detail above, we now know that pain perception is not always due to tissue damage, but can also be caused by psychological triggers.
This phenomenon can also be observed in emotional stress situations, such as the feeling of fear. The relationship between pain and anxiety in most patients is based on a pronounced fear of feeling pain or the fear that existing pain might get worse. As a result, these people develop an increased perception of pain, which in many cases leads to an increase in pain.
Another possible explanation for this phenomenon is that fear is a signal for people to protect us from dangers that could accompany the development of pain. If this fear development is strongly pronounced, it can happen that one already feels the pain by the mere expectation of the pain to come. Many recent studies have shown that there is a clear connection between the perception of pain and the existence of depression.
The exact cause for this connection is not yet understood. The interplay between somatic pain and depression can come from both directions. For example, an existing depression can lead to an increased perception of pain. On the other hand, chronic pain, even if somatic, can also lead to depression. In the therapy of these cases, where depression and somatic pain exist, it has been shown that both disorders must be treated in order to achieve a therapeutic success.
