Physical Symptoms from Unprocessed, Dysregulated Emotions

     "advances in research suggest that many medical symptoms without identified pathology may actually be caused by problems in psychophysiologic or brain-body pathways, such as abnormalities in smooth-muscle tone in the gastrointestinal tract during stress in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. Recent research also suggests that links between perturbations in brain physiology and physical symptoms are bidirectional. Changes in brain physiology secondary to stressful life events cause functional abnormalities in the body (such as abnormalities in smooth-muscle tone in the gut), and these functional abnormalities in the body are also associated with changes in brain physiology."
     Katon W, Sullivan M, Walker E. Medical symptoms without identified pathology: relationship to psychiatric disorders, childhood and adult trauma, and personality traits. Ann Intern Med 2001; 134(9 Pt 2): 917-25.
 
     "Somatization ... the translation of emotions into the development or worsening of somatic problems or complaints, is a massive burden on patients, physicians, the healthcare system & society in general, accounting for a major proportion of family physician & specialty medical visits, as well as excessive tests, medications & hospital use. Furthermore, it is a major cause of disability, corporate financial loss and probably contributes to early mortality.
     (In one study) 19% of ... sufferers of recurrent headaches were felt to be manifestations of somatization. ... alexithymia, or problems identifying and feeling emotions, was strongly associated with recurrent headache. ... many headache sufferers are psychologically distressed ... poor insight into emotional processes or alexithymia prevented the detection & treatment of these factors. ... there is a need for the development of specific assessment methods to detect relevant emotional and psychological factors in headache sufferers.  
     Specifically, headache sufferers have been shown to have difficulty regulating anger. Many headache patients tend to turn anger inward towards themselves. This effect was experimentally illustrated when migraine patients and controls were subjected to an anger-provoking situation. The migraine patients exhibited significantly less overt anger behaviour & experienced a significantly greater rise in pulse pressure than controls in the anger-provoking situation. ... anger turned inward was the most predictive of headache. Almost half of their sample of headache sufferers scored highly on anger-in, compared with only one-sixth of the matched no-headache control group. The internalization of anger and/ or trouble identifying anger has been found in high rates in patients with conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), depression and hypertension, which are often comorbid with headache." 
       Abbass A, Lovas D, Purdy A. Direct diagnosis and management of emotional factors in chronic headache patients. Cephalalgia 2008; 28(12): 1305-14.

Psychic1   www.dpreview.com