R R Bomford Health and disease are necessarily psychosomatic, so there cannot be part of medicine or some diseases which are psychosomatic. What the psychosomatic method does insists or rather reiterates, for its teachings are as old as medicine is that in health and disease man must be studied by both physical and psychological methods.
Diseases with physical manifestations could be divided into organic and functional. Organic diseases were regarded as real, objective, and the proper object of study by scientific medicine. They had physical causes, which either had been or would be elucidated as a result of increasingly thorough study by physical chemical, and bacteriological methods.
The Oxford Dictionary defines health first as “soundness of body; that condition in which its functions are duly discharged”, and gives as a further meaning “spiritual, moral or mental soundness”. I imagine it would be generally agreed that health cannot be fully explained in physical terms, and, whatever opinion we hold about disease health is certainly psychosomatic.