[Social medicine aspects of persistent somatoform pain disorder]

Persistent somatoform pain disorder is a mental disease the symptom of which--namely, physical pain--cannot be satisfactorily explained by physical findings. This is a frequently occurring disease. But it is often not identified or at least not recognised at an early stage. This leads to negative effects on the patient (e.g. chronification) and on the national social welfare system (for example, costs can mount up to thousands of million DM for medical and social welfare measures). To reduce these problems as far as possible, it is imperative to recognise the disease at an early stage. In particular, those doctors who are mainly engaged in the medical treatment of organs must be familiar with the possibility of functional pain arising from psychic factors, and they must be able to identify it in individual cases, at least as a tentative diagnosis.