Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T13:54:19.052Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Barriers to improving treatment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2011

Francis Creed
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Peter Henningsen
Affiliation:
Technische Universität München
Per Fink
Affiliation:
Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
Get access

Summary

This chapter reviews barriers to improved treatment of patients with bodily distress. The dualistic context of medical care provides a frame work for dualistic encounters between doctors and patients. Patients with bodily distress actually seek more emotional support from their doctors than patients with symptoms attributable to disease. Within the problematic context of a fundamentally dualistic healthcare system, medical doctors in both primary and secondary care find patients with bodily distress difficult to help. There is a huge gap between the great clinical and societal significance of bodily distress syndromes on the one hand and the limited efforts to understand and better treat them on the other. It is evident that the barriers directly related to the individual doctor-patient encounter as well as the more general ones of the problematic status of this significant health problem require the knowledge and skills of both medicine and psychiatry/psychology.
Type
Chapter
Information
Medically Unexplained Symptoms, Somatisation and Bodily Distress
Developing Better Clinical Services
, pp. 124 - 131
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×