Psychosocial interventions for patients with chronic disease

Hans-Christian Deter

Treatment of patients with chronic diseases will be one of the main challenges of medicine in the future. This paper presents an overview of different origins, mechanism, and symptoms necessary for understanding new and different interventions that include a psychosomatic view.In a psychosomatic therapeutic intervention there are very different targets, such as psychological symptoms, personality traits, attitudes toward disease and life, risk behaviour, and social isolation and as biological targets the change of autonomic imbalance and of the effects of the psycho-endocrinological or psycho-immunological stress responses. And there are also different psychosomatic measures that influence the individual biological, psychological and sociological targets. There is a need to give different answer to different questions in the field of psychosomatic and behavioral medicine. Comparative effectiveness research is an important strategy for solving some methodological issues. What is the target of treatment for different diseases: Symptom reduction, healing, or limiting progression to the worst case - the death of patients. We know that, the patient-physician relationship is important for every medical/therapeutic action for patients with chronic diseases.This volume of BioPsychoSocial Medicine will present four different psychosomatic treatment studies from the clinical field in the sense of phase 2 studies: Reports of patients with obesity, anorexia nervosa, chronic somatoform pain and coronary artery disease were presented.