Since psychosomatic medicine became fashionable, surgeons have suffered a lot of uplifted psychiatric eyebrows. Why perform operations if the patient is suffering less from a stomach ulcer than from an ingrowing mother-in-law? Last week Chicago Surgeon William C. Beck glared back.
Everybody has psychic conflicts of some kind, he wrote in the American Journal of Surgery. A psychiatrist can find these conflicts if he looks hard enough. But that does not necessarily mean that the patient's pain is all mental; the psychiatrist, Dr. Beck pointed out, cannot "differentiate the right lower quadrant pain of...
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