You might be surprised by how many members have had to contend with a general practitioner who leaped to the conclusion that because they didn't understand a patient's symptoms, the problem must be "mental" in origin. I've talked with any number of folks who found themselves in this situation.
We can acknowledge that stress and emotional crisis may increase personal sensitivity and aggravate pain, even if we don't buy into the mythology of stress as "cause" of pain. Stress and anxiety control can be a useful adjunct to a program of medical therapy, exercise, and (perhaps) low inflammation diet. But that said, there may still be incidents where a pain patient may find it appropriate and necessary to tell a doctor "you're full of it", after being written off as a head case.
For anyone who is dealing with issues of medical treatment, there is a book which may be useful in petitioning to get psychosomatic diagnoses removed from your medical records: "Authors of Our Own Misfortune? - Problems with Psychogenic Explanations for Physical Disease", by sociologist Angela Kennedy. It's available on Amazon at
http://www.amazon.com/Authors-our-own-misfortune-explanations/dp/1479253952/
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Fair disclosure: I wrote the following review for the book:
Angela Kennedy has assembled a major body of well-referenced research in "Authors of our own Misfortune? The Problems With Psychogenic Explanations for Physical Illnesses". The book is difficult in two ways. Kennedy writes as a social scientist and researcher. Her intended audience is primarily medical doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists who assign diagnoses of psychosomatic disorder to patients seen in their practices. Non-professional readers may find her long paragraphs and 8-line sentences to be hard slogging. In language and style, the book is nearly inaccessible to any but the most persistent of college educated non-physician readers.
This being said, a second and deeper sense of difficulty applies in this book. Kennedy directly challenges both medical doctors and mental health professionals to examine and revise their assumptions about a range of important issues pertaining to so-called "psychogenic" medical symptoms. These are by definition, symptoms of physical disorder or disease that are presumed to be "caused" by the mental state or thinking of the patient. The term "assumed" is highly central here. Kennedy is also challenging professional doctors who may be in emotional denial that what they practice in "psychosomatic" medicine is a dangerous and destructive mythology rather than a consistent or constructive healing art.
Kennedy effectively demolishes an entire branch of current psychiatric practice as codified in the 5th and previous editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), published by the American Psychiatric Association. She demonstrates compellingly that there is no basis in science for such diagnoses as "Somatic Symptom Disorder", "Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder (Conversion Disorder)", "Hypochondriasis," or "Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy". She also sets forth evidence that several presently controversial medical disorders are far better explained as poorly understood medical illness, than they are treated as outgrowths of any emotional or psychogenic process. These medical disorders include Fibromyalgia, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis /Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS).
Kennedy demonstrates predictable and unnecessary harms that grow from misdiagnosing medical disorders as mental disease entities. Chief among these is the denial of effective medical assessment and treatment to millions of people who are instead written off as "head cases" and then disregarded as reliable reporters of their own medical symptoms and conditions. The careless or frustrated discharge of "difficult" patients who have subtle or unusual medical problems can and already has led to patient deaths. Likewise, among mental health professionals charged with caring for psychosomatic patients, there are no truly effective modalities of treatment. None.
If you are a mental health professional, then you should read this book and ask yourself how many of your patients have been harmed by the fallacies it reveals. If you are a patient who has been referred by a medical doctor for mental health evaluation, or who has been diagnosed with so-called psychogenic symptoms, then you should buy this book and give it to the practitioner who diagnosed you. You may even want to add a note on the flyleaf: "if you can't do better than this, then it's time you looked for an honest line of work!"