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Psychosomatic Medicine

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Psychosomatic Medicine
AAUNI Spring 2013, class of A. Giarelli
Psychosomatic Medicine

This field of study closely examines the relationship between the body and the mind. It studies the impacts of internal factors on bodily processes. It combines knowledge from psychology, psychiatry, neurology, biology and psychoneuroimmunology 1. It investigates to what degree the psyche influences the body. It is not solemnly human affair, for example experiments showed that rats react to certain mental stimulus similarly like men.
Although psychosomatic medicine is quite a new terminology, its roots dates back far. Towards the end of the very first century there were discoveries made in the medieval islamic world. People were wondering if there's a reason for mentally ill people to tend to become ill also physically. Connections began to be clearer later. There are few names associated with passing on the true significance of psychosomatics to the world. Franz Alexander, Hungarian psychoanalytic; Helena Flanders Dunbar, an American 'Mother of the Holistic medicine'; or Robert S. Woodworth, an important American psychology text book writer 2. All these people helped the body&mind relationship to get a voice. Whereas Alexander established an own psychoanalytic institute in Chicago, it was Mrs. Dunbar who really worked with all her panties in holistic way and didn't hesitate to call her attempts 'psychosomatic'.
Everybody interested in psychotherapy must be familiar with Sigmund Freud. Although he was the father of psychoanalyzes, which many took as a template to a certain degree, psychosomatic disorders are of a more complex nature, and are indeed holistic in the onset of their treatments. Later, I will proceed with mixed responses that this approach have brought.
It is not so simple to diagnose what dysfunction in the brain might have caused certain defects on the body. Such factors are usually uncovered step by step very slowly. Nowadays there are already proven connections that fit

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