A psychosomatic symptom is one that is totally or partially influenced by psychological factors, either in its appearance or in its evolution. In other words, sometimes depression, psychological shock, a state of stress or anxiety, among other conditions, have an impact on the body and cause physical signs or their accentuation.
Among psychosomatic illnesses we find irritable bowel syndrome or functional colopathy, high blood pressure and some types of allergies.
Psychosomatic illnesses refer to unpleasant emotions, negative feelings or being subject to situations or moments of impact, which can lead to physical representation as an illness, resulting in us being beings that connect mind and body.
These diseases constitute approximately 25% of medical consultations. There are mild and transient somatic symptoms that are not always expressed in a doctor's office. However, some people experience great discomfort. The exact frequency with which this type of disease occurs is not known because the patient is not always diagnosed with these symptoms.
There are many examples of psychosomatic processes. Some are very simple and do not involve a disease: when a person feels embarrassed about something, his cheeks change color: in other words, the subject blushes. This physical alteration is due to a psychic process.
A state of nervousness can also trigger psychosomatic processes. A teenager who is about to take a test, to name one case, may have an excessive heart rate and sweating. A person asking for a street due to a traffic problem, on the other hand, can raise blood pressure.
We must distinguish between psychosomatic symptoms and somatization, which is the conversion of a mental disorder into a somatic disorder of the body: the most frequent physical symptoms observed in this case are digestive symptoms, abdominal pain, nausea or even pain in the body. joints or muscles and fatigue. In case of somatization we also speak of conversion disorder in which no cause could be found.
One of the diseases that is most linked to the emotional field are gastric disorders, especially gastritis and gastric ulcer. Several studies have shown that these subjects have an aggressive attitude to the feeling of hunger that leads them to devour food, this in turn can increase the secretion of gastric juices through stomach inflammation, the emotional basis of this phenomenon is in the dissatisfaction of the affective needs in the relationship with the mother figure, during childhood the mother provides affection and food simultaneously, so for the child food and affection are one and its provider is the mother, in adults this translates into the search for this affection through the ingestion of food.
