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Halliday suggests delimiting the concept of a psychosomatic affection to one meeting the following criteria: emotion is the precipitating factor; there is a particular personality type associated with each particular affection; there is a statistically significant disproportion in sex incidence, in contrast to the infectious diseases in which the incidence is about equal between the sexes; there is in a given patient a tendency to the alternation or sequence of different affections; a significant proportion of the close relatives of a patient with a psychosomatic disorder show the same or an associated disorder; the course of the disorder tends to be phasic. In other words 'diseases assignable to the psychosomatic category have peculiarities quite distinct from those of diseases primarily assignable to other broad etiological categories'.
One agrees thoroughly with Halliday's rejection of a recent criticism of the use of the term 'psychosomatic affection': exception was taken to the employment of the term on the grounds that 'the method of approach called psychosomatic medicine can be applied to the whole field of medicine'. While this is true, clarity of thinking is furthered by delimiting the term in so far as possible to those conditions which may be grouped under a unifying etiological category.