And, I’ll be honest, I didn’t always have sympathy for them. I thought I knew the word that explained their conditions — “psychosomatic” — which was just a fancy way of saying “it’s all in your head.”
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But Is It All In Your Head? completely changed how I think about those kinds of conditions. Not only can they be just as serious as “regular” disorders, but they are also INCREDIBLY common.
Dr. O’Sullivan is a noted neurologist, who is now a consultant in clinical neurophysiology and neurology at London’s National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, so she knows what she’s talking about.
According to her research, as many as ONE-THIRD of people who go to see their doctor every day have symptoms that can’t easily be explained by medical science.
The World Health Organization conducted a study in 1997, in fifteen different cities around the world, to try to quantify how often primary care doctors were encountering “psychosomatic” symptoms in their patients.
The final results showed that as many as 20 percent of the patients exhibited at least SIX medically unexplainable symptoms, or, to quoteDr. O’Sullivan, “a sufficient number to significantly impair their quality of life.”
A 2005 study estimated that the cost of treating psychosomatic disorders in the United States was $256 billion a year.
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