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Sensitization, somatization, and subjective health complaints

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Abstract

More than half of the days lost due to sickness absence are due to diagnostic groups that solely or mainly depend on subjective statements from the patient. The most frequent subjective health complaints are musculoskeletal pain. These conditions do not seem to qualify as psychiatric or mental disorders, but are not strictly somatic states either. Terms like somatization may be inadequate terms for states that may be best understood as psychobiological feedback loops. Subjective health complaints is suggested as a neutral, descriptive term. Only a minority requires treatment and sickness compensation for prolonged periods for these very common states. In these patients the neurons in feed-forward and positive feed-back loops may have developed sensitization. These patients tend to show an abnormal sensitivity to sensory input from muscles, the gastrointestinal tract, and to smell and taste. It seems to be futile to search for single-factor solutions. This approach opens up for the possible effectiveness of many different types of treatment, breaking the feedback loops.

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My research in this field was sponsored by the Norwegian Research Council and the Royal Norwegian Department of Social Affairs

For their help with this article at various stages, I am grateful to Eva Albertsen, Arnold Berstad, Hege

R. Eriksen, Ellen Miland Haldorsen, Tone Tangen Haug, Karsten Hytten, and Miranda Olff. I thank Ingvard Wilhelmsen for valuable criticisms and suggestions on earlier versions of this article

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Ursin, H. Sensitization, somatization, and subjective health complaints. Int. J. Behav. Med. 4, 105–116 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327558ijbm0402_1

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