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Treating the Whole Patient with Functional GI Disorder
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Because complex interactions between the brain, the gut and the environment contribute to functional gastrointestinal disorders, effective treatments should address both biological and psychological factors, experts say.
“We’ve now gotten long past the simplistic understanding that many medical problems, their etiology, and their maintenance is understood soley by focusing on what’s going on within the physiology of an individual,” Rona L. Levy, PhD, of the Behavioral Medicine Research Group, School of Social Work, University of Washington, Seattle, said in an interview with Healio Gastroenterology. “We’ve come to realize there is a continuous interaction among what is going on cognitively, physiologically and environmentally for an individual — what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, how they are affected by what is going on around them all interact to produce what we call symptoms. Understanding the role of central nervous system processing — simply put, the brain — is key in all of this.”
Thus, mounting data demonstrate that psychological therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy and gut-directed hypnotherapy are effective for treating these patients. However, there are a number of barriers to providing integrated care to such patients, including a persistent stigma regarding functional somatic disorders.
“Lack of GI-trained therapists, low referral rates in the absence of clear psychological distress, and poor insurance coverage for these treatments,” are why “psychological therapies are not available to most patients ... despite overwhelmingly positive findings,” Bonney Reed-Knight, PhD, pediatric psychologist and assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues wrote in a recent review article.
For breaking gastroenterology news, see Trend Watch, and make sure to visit Healio.com/GI for our recent coverage of the Advances in IBD Meeting in Orlando, Florida.
The Editors Healio Gastroenterologygastroenterology@slackinc.com