Before referring to my own experience, I would like to mention other works that approach this “illness” with an integrated perspective.
I will start with a brief summary of an article published by Clarín, an Argentinean newspaper, on February 16th, 2003, under the general headline: “La llegada de la medicina psicosomática (The arrival of psychosomatic medicine)”, and untitled “ Así en la mente como en el cuerpo (In the mind as in the body)”.
In the United States, PSYCHOSOMATIC MEDICINE might become a new specialty in medicine that private medical insurance and social security still look with suspicion.
It has been proved that people often get over an illness faster and spend less in health care when treatments are concerned not only with physical pain but with feelings and thoughts.
One of the professionals that provides this information is Dr. David Sobel. Dr. Sobel manages the information about the patients of Kaiser Permanente, a medical company that has millions of affiliates in the United States.
He states that in 25% of the cases of people who go to the doctor, the physical symptoms described to the physicians are likely to be consequence of their emotional state.
FIBROMYALGIA is one of the illnesses mentioned.
March Schoren, Assistant Professor in Medicine Studies at the University of California in LA declares that we can now say that almost everything can be considered psychosomatic.
Dr. Sobel says that he is surprised by the fact that medicine has taken so much time to admit something which is too obvious. He finds it hard to believe that we have been stubborn enough to think of mind and body as separate entities.
There are certain barriers that prevent psychosomatic medicine from being understood and so psychosomatic illnesses are often confused with imaginary illnesses.

Finally, I would like to add to this summary the example mentioned by the psychiatrist Dr. Marc Feldman. He could not understand why his patients called off their appointment at the moment they arrived at the door of his office in the Hospital of Duke University.
It took doctor Feldman some time to realize that the reason was that next to his name at the door of the office, it was written: “Psychosomatic Medicine”. People were convinced that they were going to be told that “It was all a psychological problem” (for many, a synonym of “madness”).
In Argentina, the Weizsaecker Center of Medical Practice (Centro Weizsaecker de Consulta Médica), directed by the psychoanalyst Dr.Luis Chiozza, has a research program on psychosomatic disorders that is acknowledged in many parts of the world.
Luckily, there are some other institutions working on this subject.
In France, the work of the psychoanalyst Dr. André Green (someone that I consider one of my most valuable teachers), contributes tremendously to the understanding of the place “affection” and “body” have for the psychoanalytic thought.
I conceive Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, as a DOCTOR that tried to understand and cure the diseases that appeared as undecipherable enigmas for the medicine of his days.
The diseases that called his attention in the very beginning were those that affected THE BODY with apparently no valid or effective explanation, and with no adequate treatments that guaranteed recovery for the long term.
His comings and goings from theory to practice are admirable. He was humble enough to accept his mistakes and failures and capable of correcting them and broadening his field of study as he made new discoveries.
From this point of view, and making a very brief summary, the concept of psychosomatic disorders is constantly flying over Freudian psychoanalysis.
His concept of “complementary series” includes what is constitutionally inherited as well as the predisposition of each subject and his childhood history, which is unique and unrepeatable. All this helps to discover what triggers off something that might have otherwise never appeared or would have been expressed in other ways.
In relation to the dispositional factor, we find at least two ways of dealing with it. The first one, to consider it a “fatal destiny”, which places us in the position of passive victims of what “destiny chose for us”. The second, to consider it information that can be useful as a trigger point for further change. And this would place us in another place: in that of protagonists of our own life.