Psychosomatic medicine: The art of coping and salutogenesis

Abstract

Although the term psychosomatic is used in a wide range of contexts – from media to clinics – no exact definition of the term exists that even practitioners and experts of different schools in this domain agreed on. This may be due to its intertidisciplinary, multisystemic, and evolutionary nature. Psychosomatic medicine is an approach to health which deals with the beliefs, narratives, relations, and behaviors formed around a disorder as well as the effects of them on the disorder, structure, and function of the body. This approach seeks for leading the material-energetic-symbolic-reflective flow of signs in order to activate the salutogenesis vs. pathogenesis, and promote adaptive coping of the organisms with the disease. As such it can be regarded not exclusively as a specialty but as an approach which integrates different specialties of the medicine, connect the two lifeworlds of patient and client with the medical system, and bring about mind-body coordination through the use of different modalities.