The term “psychosomatic disorder” is mainly used to mean “a physical disease that is thought to be caused or made worse, by mental factors.” but where there is no physical disease. For example, chest pain may be caused by stress and no physical disease can be found. A number of factors may play a role in psychosomatic disorders, such as personality traits; genetic or environmental family influences; biological factors; learned behavior and more. Psychosomatic disorders can have mild to severe effects on one’s quality of life, from interfering with the normal ability to function to causing physical or mental disability. 

A psychosomatic illness originates from emotional stress and manifests in the body as physical pain and other symptoms. Usually when a person’s immune system is compromised due to stress. 

A common misconception is that a psychosomatic condition is imaginary or     “all in someone’s mind”. I have seen the patient comes with files of lots of investigations – all are normal usually. The relatives now either start telling the patient, all of your investigations are normal so you are perfectly normal...all this is made up by you or they keep on changing the doctors. Patient gets an added frustration as they get a feeling that no one is able to understand the patient. Yes....though the investigations are normal, he is still suffering.

 All the tests are designed to assess normal functioning of different organs & chemicals in our body. Here in this case, all the organs are functioning normal. So there is no problem in physiological function of any organ. The term psychosomatic refers to real physical symptoms that arise from the mind and are influenced by emotions rather than a specific organic cause in the body such as injury or infection. 

Mind & body are not separate actually. As an example, let’s see a cooker. When steam is generated it gives whistle. If we don’t allow the whistle n press the lid tightly, the pressure will buildup and up until the lid blows off or the cooker will break at its weakest point i.e. valve. The human equivalent would be holding emotions.  What will happen?  The same goes for people. Someone who is under stress and not able to “vent” their emotions or who tries to “keep it all in” will eventually reach an emotional breaking point.  If one of your body systems is weakened, this is where a stress-related illness is most likely to develop. If your weakest point physically is your head, you’ll develop headache or backache or Urticaria or frequent colds and flu. 

This is not to say that the physical symptoms you experience should only be dealt with from a mental health standpoint.  As noted, the physical symptoms of psychosomatic illness are real. The pain you feel in your back isn’t just felt in your brain, but the chemical secretions that begin with stress may lead to actual inflammation in your back muscles. 

In Classical Homoeopathy, there is more emphasis is given to understand the person in disease. Each patient is treated individually considering emotional and physical symptoms. Keen efforts are taken to find out the origin of stress in each patient. So Homoeopathy becomes a better option to treat psychosomatic diseases.