Psychosomatic Disorders Affecting the Mouth: A Critical Review

Abstract

Modern medicine has come to the realization that the human body cannot be treated in terms of a mere sum of its different parts, but must rather be dealt with in terms of the psychophysiological aspects of the organisms as a whole. The mouth is a window to body’s health and oral health state can offer lot of clues about the overall health and sometimes the first sign of a disease shows up in mouth. So there is need to learn more about the intimate connection between oral and overall health. A psychosomatic disorder involves both body and mind and these diseases have physical symptoms originating from mental or emotional causes like stress, anxiety and depression. There is a rapid upsurge in prevalence rates of psychosomatic disorders in past few decades globally as a consequence of rapidly changing modern life style of people as well as long standing emotion, social and professional stress. It cannot be argued that there are a significant number of patients reporting to the dental office with complaints primarily of psychological origin that affects oral and paraoral structures having definite psychosomatic cause but unfortunately remained unrecognized because of limited nature of their presenting features. Such patients consistently complain of a symptom that he or she interprets as abnormal but dentist can find no convincing physical explanation for the same. This has emerged as one of the most difficult problems faced in clinical practice these days for the dental professionals. Thus this review highlights the significance of increasing psychological factors in society resulting in altered physiological responses causing orofacial region pathologies, struggles in handling such patients and challenging treatment plans with highly important role played by recognition of such patients with role of counseling and early referral in patients to psychiatrist.