5 - Barriers to improving treatment

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.