[Chronic pelvic pain--a still too little appreciated disease picture]

Chronic pelvic pain often means for patients as well as for their physicians a dilemma concerning diagnosis and therapy: the common medical approach does often not fit for essential therapeutic needs, which should include somatic examination as well as psychosomatic (psychotherapeutic) concepts for escaping from further somatic chronification typical for CPP-patients. The study performed during 1995-98 with 220 patients of the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology in collaboration with the Psychosomatic Department in the St. Johann's Hospital of Salzburg has shown results about laparoscopic/pelviscopic and psychosomatic interventions in patients with chronic pelvic pain. Evidence-based somatic medicine is not able to explain the discrepancy between pathomorphology and intensity of pain in CPP-patients. The specific dilemma in treating CPP-patients could be characterized as the following: Somatisation is often the one and only symptom presented by CPP-patients to gynecologists. It is the physician's task to stay in a relationship with the patient and treat her symptomatically on somatic symptoms. The relationship will provide the chance to introduce a psychosomatic approach and engage psychotherapeutic work on the reluctance of accepting a psychogenesis of CPP. Gynecologists lack psychosomatic knowledge and concepts for treatment and therefore often contribute to the chronification of CPP in patients approached only in somatic terms.