Abstract
While a wide range of investigations including mind-body interaction have been expected, researches in the area of psychosomatic medicine are behind because of it's own difficulties. For instance, the following difficulties exist: patients with psychosomatic disorders are heterogeneous and are difficult to be treated as a group of subject, a number of phenomenons in this area are not suitable for quantitative assessment, the systems are complex and multifactorial, and it is difficult to treat subjective assessment while it is important. Various attempts for these difficulties have been made. We have tried to investigate mind-body interactions and find clues to clarify the pathologic conditions of psychosomatic disorders through psychophysiological approaches and some combined methods. In this article, we introduce our attempts and discuss the symposium's theme "The research methods in psychosomatic medicine". The results consist of 4 analytic methods: 1) univariate and linear analysis, 2) multivariate analysis, 3) subjective bodily feeling and psychophysiological assessment, and 4) nonlinear analysis. Through these results and the process, the following discussions are presented: the risks in use of mean value, a probable assessment axis penetrating diagnoses based on biomedicine, investigations about the relationship between objective and subjective assessment, limitations of quantification, and a potency of non-linear analyses. We showed probabilities to catch phenomenon including mind-body interactions to some extent by changing the viewpoint, although our methods are rather classical and the data are based on reductionism.
