Somatic awareness in the clinical care of patients with body distress symptoms

Donald Bakal¹^,2 , Patrick Coll²^,3 and Jeffrey Schaefer¹^,2

¹Department of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

²Clinic for Mind/Body Medicine, Calgary Health Region, Calgary, Canada

³Department of Psychiatry, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

author email corresponding author email

BioPsychoSocial Medicine 2008, 2:6doi:10.1186/1751-0759-2-6


Published:	21 February 2008

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide primary care physicians and medical specialists with an experiential psychosomatic framework for understanding patients with body distress symptoms. The framework relies on somatic awareness, a normal part of consciousness, to resolve the dualism inherent in conventional multidisciplinary approaches. Somatic awareness represents a guiding healing heuristic which acknowledges the validity of the patient's physical symptoms and uses body sensations to identify the psychological, physiological, and social factors needed for symptom self-regulation. The experiential approach is based on psychobiologic concepts which include bodily distress disorder, central sensitization, dysfunctional breathing, and contextual nature of mood.