Mind-body health

You’re suffering from physical symptoms—maybe chronic pain, fatigue, headaches, or dizziness. You’ve tried medications, physical treatments, and changes in diet, or exercise, but none of these have provided a cure. Medical tests aren’t adequately explaining what is wrong, and the symptoms continue.

Perhaps you’ve gotten a diagnosis, but the diagnosis is just a vague word like “fibromyalgia” or “irritable bowels”. The diagnosis may be an accurate label for your symptoms, but it doesn’t explain the cause. Without a known cause for your symptoms, it is hard to know the best treatment, so naturally your treatments aren’t producing the results you desire. Your frustration with the medical approach to your symptoms is building.

If any of this sounds familiar, you may be suffering from a mind-body disorder (also known as “psychophysiologic disorders”) in which stress and emotional factors are contributing to or causing physical symptoms. These physical manifestations of stress are not “all in your head”, but can be the result of the impact of stress and emotional factors on the body. When stress and emotional factors are contributing to or causing our symptoms, talk therapy can help in ways that physical medicine can’t.

Common mind-body problems that are often not detected by medical assessments, and they tend to respond poorly to physical medicines. Common mind-body problems that can be treated with talk therapy include chronic pain, chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowels, headaches, migraine, erectile dysfunciton, dizziness, numbness, tingling, muscle weakness (“conversion”), muscle tension, tics, psychogenic movement disorders, pelvic pain, and more. Because stress can impact every system of the body, almost any physical problem can have a stress component. See this blog post I wrote, and others that I have written for more information:

As an expert in mind-body psychology. I can help with:

  • Assessment to help determine whether and how stress and emotional factors are contributing to your symptoms
  • Treatment based around mind body solutions to help you overcome any emotional processes we find to be contributing to your symptoms
  • Collaboration with your other healthcare providers to help with treatment decisions

Other mind-body problems: As part of my work with mind-body health, I also work with people with health-related anxieties and hypochondria. I also work with people who have a medical diagnosis that they are having difficulty adjusting to emotionally. 

If you think that stress or emotional factors may be contributing to your physical health problem, or you want to have an assessment with me to rule out emotional contributors to your pain, please feel free to contact me for a free 15-minute phone consultation. Also, please feel free to check out the website for the Institute for Emotions and Health, DC (IEHDC), a group practice I co-founded. The IEHDC website features blog posts and articles that will help you learn more about mind-body disorders and therapy.