Are you expressing your problems through your body?
Medical science studies and conducts research on the causes, diagnosis and treatment of physical disorders in people. It aims to detect unusual conditions in the living organism and determine the appropriate treatment. Situations that threaten a person's physical health can also cause psychological disorders for many reasons such as fear of death, disruption of physical integrity, and negative situations brought about by treatment. At the same time, psychological disorders can also cause some physical health problems. It has been known that the body and soul work together since the ancient Greek scientist Hippocrates, known as the father of medicine. Charcot was the first person to apply hypnosis and saw that psychosomatic disorders could be treated through suggestion and hypnosis. After Pavlov's studies, it was accepted that the organism gives certain reactions in response to certain effects. Freud, on the other hand, brought the awareness that unconscious wishes and desires, repressed emotions and thoughts affect human behavior and organs.
If psychological factors play a role in the formation of physical disorders, this is called psychosomatic disorder. It is thought that repressed emotions, impulses and thoughts underlie this disorder. These experiences manifest themselves as physical disorders as a result of the person using repression and somatization as a coping mechanism in the face of traumatic events and negative experiences. It has been observed that people with this disorder have problems expressing their feelings and thoughts and even perceiving them. They symbolically express their anger, resentment, anxiety, disappointment, and discomfort caused by their traumatic experiences through their bodies. In such a situation, applying only psychotherapy to these people or treating only their physical illness will not provide any permanent benefit. The person must primarily treat his physical illness, but he must also receive psychological support.
If the underlying cause of the physical illness is the person's psychological dynamics, internal conflicts, repressed feelings and impulses, and unexpressed emotional conflicts, these factors Intervention without resolution will be incomplete, physical discomfort may recur, the disease may not respond to medical treatment, and may progress negatively. At this point, medicine and psychology should work together. This is exactly the field of consultation liaison psychiatry. Understanding, predicting, diagnosing and treating the psychological burden of physical disorders are part of their work. For example, suppressed hostility has been found to be directly related to migraines. A study conducted in Italy showed that women with uterine cancer were less close to their parents than women without cancer. A study conducted in Europe showed that people with cancer evaluated their childhood more negatively than people without cancer. As understood from many other similar studies, stress and negative life experiences can cause physical discomfort in a person.
The concept of medical psychology can be interpreted as follows; It is the study of investigating the psychological aspects of medical disorders, predicting the effects of treatment on a person's psychology, what kind of feelings a deterioration in physical health may cause in a person and what kind of support should be given to the person, and developing methods of coping with possible changes in the person's social life. The physical discomfort experienced by a person can affect his life in many ways.
Therefore, it is not possible to separate and evaluate the biological, psychological and social structure of a person from each other. A person is constantly affected by the outside world and reacts in certain ways; for this to be healthy, the person must be in a state of biological balance, and this state of balance is called homeostatic balance. The system that ensures human biological balance is called the neurovegetative system, and the center of this system is the limbic system in the intermediate brain. The limbic system consists of the hypothalamus, hippocampus, cingulate gyrus, area entohinalis, nucleus amygdala, gyrus cinguli and pituitary gland. The neurovegetative system consists of the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system, and the limbic system manages this system through the endocrine pathway. The sympathetic system is responsible for alertness and vitality; it is a consuming system. suck. It works by consuming energy and activates the heart and circulatory system. Its effective ingredient is adrenaline. The parasympathetic system is aimed at rest, energy recovery and nutrition, and its effective substance is acetylcholine. These two systems work in mutual balance in a healthy person. Disruption of this balance can even result in death.
At this point, it would be more descriptive to talk about Selye's theory of harmony. An internal or external stimulus has an effect on the biological system and the sympathetic nervous system is activated by the secretion of adrenaline. As the sympathetic system increases tension, the parasympathetic system also activates and these two systems establish balance at another level. This is the general adaptation syndrome. However, in cases where the tension increases too much, if the organism's tolerance level is exceeded, a shock event occurs and the system may collapse. The organism may die, but in cases where it does not die, the system is reestablished. Sometimes, the system responds to internal or external stimuli that disrupt the balance with some of it, not all of it, and adaptation is achieved with the change in that region. This is called local adaptation syndrome and we can evaluate and make sense of psychosomatic diseases within this framework.
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