Abstract
Psychosomatic medicine in the clinical practice of dentistry and oral surgery emphasizes that all clinicians should take note of all aspects of the patient, from both mental and somatic standpoints. In Japan various diseases have been included in the category of “psychosomatic diseases in dentistry”, but some of them are inappropriately so classified if the term psychosomatic diseases is viewed in a narrow sense; they seem instead to be psychiatric disorders.
In this article, we present a new classification of “psychosomatic diseases in dentistry” and we review concepts of psychosomatic diseases.
Group I. Beliefs of imagined abnormality of the body (abnormal thought contents).
Group II. Abnormal sensations in the absence of confirmatory physical evidence.
Group III-a. Motor disturbances of voluntary muscles.
Group III-b. Functional disturbances in the autonomic nervous system.
Group IV. Physical disorders with organic changes and/or established pathophysiology.
We think that Group IV should be called psychosomatic diseases in a strict sense.
