Current status and future prospects for research in psychosomatic medicine

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the current status and future prospects for research in psychosomatic medicine. The heterogeneity of the subject populations studied has emerged as a major methodological weakness of earlier research that led to hypotheses concerning the role of intrapsychic conflict in the activation of specific organic processes. The naturalistic studies of human subjects have also suggested that bereavement or separation may be the critical antecedents of behavioral disturbances and physiological change both in man and animals. Profound behavioral changes in young primates are known to occur upon separation from their mothers. It is shown that on separating 14-day-old rats from their mothers, a profound fall in heart rate occurred and the heart rate could be restored on feeding rat milk to the pups. Another set of findings that derive from psychophysiologic research in animals and man teaches to look for patterned changes in several endocrine and autonomic variables. From such a pattern, it may be possible to discern mediating mechanisms showed that mental arithmetic produced changes in BP, muscle and splanchnic blood flow, heart rate. and cardiac output in normal and hypertensive subjects, which differed in the two subject populations only in duration and degree.