Catchword: somaticizer

Filed Under: English, Health, Medical

Part of Speech: n.

Quotation: Early after its inception in the mid-1940s, the Kaiser Permanente HMO in Northern California discovered that 60 percent of physician visits were by patients who had no physical disease. The relationship between emotional stress and physical symptoms was not clearly understood at the time, and these patients were labelled “hypochondriacs.” In time, the HMO physicians were persuaded to use a less pejorative term, and the designation “somatizer” was subsituted to refer to persons who were displacing emotional problems into physical symptoms.…Garfield decided somaticizer should be triaged into a psychological system.

Author:
Nick Cummings

Article, Document, Publication, Web Site:
Focused Psychotherapy

Date of Publication:
Aug. 1, 1995

Page Number:
21

This cite belongs to a full entry for somaticizer.