Abstract
In Japan, the boundary between Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychiatry is not clear. At Kyushu University Hospital, we have a separate department for each field. To try and clarify the boundary between these two departments, I investigated the patients who were sent from one of the two departments to the other. In one previous year, 32 patients were sent from the department of psychosomatic medicine to the department of psychiatry. Among these patients almost all kinds of psychiatric illnesses could be found, therefore, physicians of psychosomatic medicine are required to have sufficient knowledge to distinguish the major types of psychiatric illnesses. On the other hand, only a few patients were sent from the department of psychiatry to the department of psychosomatic medicine. Most of them were patients who had some somatic symptoms, but no abnormal findings were identified during the routine physical examination and laboratory tests carried out by the departments of internal medicine, surgery and so on. However, many of these patients improved after being diagnosed and treated by physicians of the department of psychosomatic medicine. As a result, the ability of the physicians who belong to the department of psychosomatic medicine regarding the diagnosis and treatment of functional somatic diseases should be regarded more highly than it is at present. I therefore believe the final and most important aim of psychosomatic medicine should be to provide the best possible treatments for patients with somatic disease, and not to compete with the department of psychiatry to get more patients.
