Psychosomatic pain

Psychosomatic pain is pain that is real for the patient but has no organic or physical cause. Usually pain has an indispensable protective function to remind the person that he should not do certain things anymore. For example, touching a hot stove plate leads to enormous pain.

This is also a good thing, because otherwise you would touch the hot stove plate again and again and then get burns. Nevertheless, there are also pains that do not perform a protective function and are therefore only stressful for the patient. These include psychosomatic pain.

In general, studies have shown that patients deal with pain in different ways. If a patient is particularly afraid of possible pain, he often feels the pain much more intensively and worse than a patient who is not afraid of pain. This different way of perceiving pain seems to have something to do with the patient’s attitude and expectations.

Since the pain is intensified by fear or panic, it is called psychosomatic pain. This is often acute pain. However, psychosomatic pain can be chronic.

For example, depression can lead to chronic back pain. Furthermore, there is a disease called hypochondria. This is the patient’s belief that he or she is ill. Patients who suffer from hypochondria are very intensively occupied with their illness. In some cases this can go so far that the patient imagines the psychosomatic pain without it really existing.

Psychosomatic back pain

Many patients now suffer from back pain. These can have various causes. Back pain is often caused by the fact that many people have to sit for long periods (for example at work) and do too little sport to compensate.

However, there are also cases in which back pain is psychosomatically caused. Psychosomatic back pain is pain that has no apparent physical cause. This means that neither a herniated disc nor tense muscles are responsible for the patient suffering from back pain.

The cause here is a mental or psychological problem which the patient has not yet solved. Psychological problems can make themselves felt through various physical symptoms. Among other things, psychosomatic back pain can occur.

Here the patient suffers from sometimes severe back pain, especially in stressful situations, without this pain being due to an acute physical event. Psychosomatic back pain is particularly common in depressive patients. However, it is important that the patient is aware that the pain can also be caused by the fact that the patient does not move sufficiently due to his depression but is increasingly in a sitting or lying position.

This can lead to muscular tension, which is not psychologically caused but is caused by the incorrect posture of the body. In addition, the enormous fear of back pain can lead to the patient adopting a relieving posture, which then leads to nerve and muscle constriction.Thus an anxiety disorder can also lead to back pain and it is often difficult to differentiate where this pain comes from. On the one hand, the pain can be caused by the fear alone, but on the other hand it can also be caused by a wrong relieving posture.

Psychosomatic back pain is therefore a so-called exclusion diagnosis. This means that the doctor first looks to see if the back pain does not come from the intervertebral disc, from a nerve entrapment, from muscular tension or similar. If no physical problems could be detected, but the patient suffers from mental problems, the diagnosis of psychosomatic back pain is made. These articles may also be of interest to you:

Psychosomatic back pain
Therapy of chronic back pain – What helps best?