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Despite extensive developments in the field of psychosomatic medicine, internists, surgeons, gynaecologists, paediatricians, and general practitioners who attend psychosomatic meetings and who take part in colloquia or demonstrations of interviews and psychotherapy have been rarae avaes.
Here is a book on the psychotherapy of psychosomatic disorders by one such rare bird. Dr Broom is the founder and director of the Arahura Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. This medical centre for patients with allergic disorders offers medical and psychotherapeutic assessments and, where appropriate, a brief psychodynamic psychotherapy (i.e. where psychological factors are relevant to the aetiology of the condition). His team comprises general practitioners and psychotherapists. Dr Broom trained initially as a physician and was for some years a researcher in immunology before training as a liaison-consultation psychiatrist and also as a psychotherapist.
His book describes his and his colleagues' medical and psychotherapeutic experiences with these patients. We know from various studies quoted in this book how commonly the somatoform disorders occur in general practice and in hospital settings alike. The figures he quotes suggest that as many as 30 per cent of all attenders in general medical clinics in hospital suffer with somatoform disorders. Also, we know how often in the hospital setting these disorders are either ignored or else managed by non-psychodynamically-oriented liaison-consultation psychiatric services. By a somatoform disorder we usually mean those conditions in which the patient's physical symptoms are produced by a disturbance in bodily function, without any alteration of bodily structure where psychological factors are likely to be causative. These disorders include conversion hysterical reactions, psychogenic pain, body dysmorphic disorder, hypochondriasis and a more complex group of polysymptomatic disorders in which disturbances of body fu