The Problems Of Pain Description In Patients With Alexithymia

There are diseases that can be identified by the data obtained through laboratory and instrumental analysis but there also a lot of diseases that do not have explicit morphological substrate and can be diagnosed only on the basis of patients' reports.Pain is one of the most frequent medical problems of the second type, and the task of clinical linguists is to help neurologists and other doctors treating pain to organize the effective communication with patients and help them to find the appropriate words for their feelings.Verbal communication difficulties in the process of collecting anamnesis vitae can lead to an incorrect diagnosis and complicate the recovery. The most difficult task is to receive the precise description of pain from the patients with alexithymia.Alexithymia is usually regarded not as a disease, but as a specific cognitive feature. Currently, alexithymia is considered as a non-specific risk factor for psychosomatic diseases. The patients with alexithymia are not able to express their feelings verbally. They can hardly execute the procedure of naming their sensations. In everyday life it may be not so important, but when they communicate their complaints of pain to a doctor, it causes a lot of problems in diagnosis.In this situation the help of linguists is really necessary because they help establish contact with the patient and choose the appropriate speech material. They create pain questionnaires and sets of descriptors which can be offered to the patients with alexithymia to make diagnosis easier.The first step was the survey conducted in population without alexithymic features. The respondents were asked to describe their pain. First, respondents were tested on the Toronto alexithymia scale (validated Russian version of TAS-20) to identify the level of alexithymia. The survey involved males (15) and females (25) between the ages of 2045 years. The sample was random. Then, this group of people was asked to describe headache, back pain and heart pain (the respondents were tested on the McGill Pain Questionnaire). The results were analysed and included into the database of descriptors for later use in clinical practice in application to the patients with alexithymia.