I'm John Batser visiting with Dr. Ronald Dworkin, writing for Civitas Outlook at Civitas Institute,

the University of Texas, a review of the age of diagnosis, how our obsession with medical labels is making us sicker.

Psychosomatic. Dr. I was taught many decades ago in the 20th century, the psychosomatic is not real, but

it is real.

Why?

Because people could have actual physical symptoms when their minds are poisoned in a certain

way.

If they're depressed or they're fearful or if they think they may have a disease or they're

convinced they have disease,

they will begin to express symptoms, actual physical symptoms. Now, it's curious, the state of psychosomatic disease right now is somewhat similar to the state of depression, say, in the

1960s. Depression in the 1960s was sort of dismissed. It's all in your head. It's not a serious disease.

And eventually doctors realized, well, no, this is a serious problem. We have to take it seriously.

And we have to treat it. Now, sometimes the pendulum swings too far in one direction and may have been depression.

We may be overtreating depression or at least every day in happiness.

The same situation for psychosomatic illness, it's not really understood or even respected in

medical circles.

And in most lay people think it's sort of a silly thing, they'll say pejoratively, oh,

that's psychosomatic, it doesn't mean anything.

But people can have real symptoms and dangerous symptoms, chest pain, palpitations and so on.

These are serious symptoms and they're mentally induced because of some state of bind that the patient has.

So in a way, psychosophomatic symptoms, they need to be recognized.

We don't want the pendulum swinging too far in the direction that depression did,

...