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The Somatizing Patient in General Practice

Objective: The exploratory study described in this article followed two groups of patients over a twelve-month period. Subjects were drawn from a pool of patients who had consulted their general practitioner during the three-month selection period. One group consisted of patients who had consulted their general practitioner at least once about a physical complaint that the GP regarded as predominantly psychosocial; these patients did not articulate complaints of an explicitly mental or social nature. The second group was characterized by the fact that its members voiced precisely such mental or social complaints. Method: The study investigated the extent to which the two groups (which were comparable in the severity of their complaints) differ with respect to patient characteristics such as the severity of their possible psychological problems, the frequency with which they visited their GPs, and the types of complaints—e.g. mental, psychosomatic and purely physical—they presented. Results: It was found that patients in the first group, whose somatic complaints were seen to have a psychosocial basis, are not the dependent types generally mentioned in theories about somatization. In fact, they adopt a more independent attitude to the GP than do patients voicing mental complaints. There are indications that for “somatizing” patients, underlying mental problems are less important than for “psychologizing” patients. Conclusions: Both the somatizing patients and the psychologizing patients continued very frequent visits to their GP during the 12-month research period, although chiefly to address physical complaints that the GP also assessed as such.