TYPES OF PAIN: ORGANIC PAIN FROM PSYCHOLOGICAL CAUSES
Sometimes when we are very tense in our mind we unconsciously hold our muscles very tensely. This may occur in driving our car. We may come to feel pain in our neck and shoulders. This is organic pain because it is due to the tense muscles stimulating the nerves; yet on the other hand the prime cause is psychological as the tense muscles are due to our tension of mind. The point that I wish to make is that organic and psychological factors are often closely interwoven in producing pain.
It is well known that fear, fright, or anxiety may cause diarrhoea. Soldiers going into battle experience it, and to a lesser extent so do students facing an important examination. The diarrhoea is of course caused by the contraction of the muscle of the bowels. Sometimes in these cases the contraction may be quite violent and uncoordinated. Pain results from the stimulation of the nerves of the bowels, but the contractions were the result of psychological causes. Such a condition is technically known as true psychosomatic pain.
A minor business executive in his fifties had been tense for some years. At periods of greater stress and greater tension he would be stricken with cramp-like pains in the stomach. The patient was well aware of the association of the pain with anxiety. This seemed to be a real psychosomatic pain in which anxiety caused intense contraction of the muscles of the stomach and so produced an organic type of pain.
We must not get diverted into a complicated discussion of the relationship between body and mind. I think we have gone far enough to see that this is a very complex relationship, and as a result organic and psychological causes are continually interacting where pain is concerned.
I have mentioned that I have had teeth extracted without anaesthetic. This would appear to be a matter of the control of purely organic pain. But it appears more simple than it is. The fact that I knew the dentist to be a kind, gentle, and competent person was undoubtedly a psychological help for me to feel no discomfort. So even in the simplest cases, both organic and psychological influences interact to determine the severity of pain.
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