Breaking the vicious circle – a central mechanism of therapy for all three diseases covered in detail in this issue of InFo NEUROLOGIE&PSYCHIATRIE.
Let’s start with burnout, the cause of which is a chronic imbalance between the demands of work and personal resources. Treatment and prevention consists in correcting this imbalance. In eating disorders, dissatisfaction with one’s appearance, among other things, is associated with disturbances in self-esteem, emotion regulation, and problems in relationships at the beginning of a pathophysiological cascade of altered dieting behavior, which can have physical consequences that in turn maintain the causes. Pain disorders, which often go unrecognized for too long into chronic stages, focus on avoiding physical activity, among other things, to prevent acute pain. It is precisely this that maintains the vicious circle of pain, immobility, exaggerated sparing behavior and even greater pain.
“Knowledge of modern disease concepts at the biological, psychological, and social levels is essential to derive modern multimodal treatment algorithms, which will ultimately improve treatment.”
In all these disorders, there are regularly pronounced psychosocial problems at work or school, couple and family conflicts, or social isolation, for example. This is generally countered by an improvement in symptomatology. All three disorders also have in common their frequency both in the practice of the general practitioner, but also in that of the neurologist and psychiatrist.
Every practicing physician knows patients with the above-mentioned clinical pictures and has had his or her own experience of how difficult their treatment can sometimes be. In order to improve treatment options, it is helpful to know the modern concepts of disease at the biological, psychological and social levels, from which modern multimodal therapy algorithms can be derived.
We are pleased to be able to present you, dear readers, with comprehensive overviews of the background of the diseases and, in particular, the diagnostic and therapeutic considerations in didactically well structured training articles in this issue, and to offer quickly implementable diagnostic and therapeutic concepts.
We wish you an exciting and educational training!
Prof. Dr. med. Erich Seifritz
Prof. Dr. med. Philippe Lyrer
