Functional Disorders, Somatic Symptoms and Chronic Pain (Jones, 8/5/2026)

 A recording of this presentation is available HERE

Thanks to Dr. Kendall Jones for a fantastic opener for R3/Senior Grand Rounds presentation this week. She borrowed from a lecture she attended last spring at the Family Medicine Colloquium by Kaiser Family Medicine teachers. . .but really brought it home to our patient population. 

If you are a primary care clinician caring for patients with functional disorders (think IBS, migraine, fibromyalgia. . .and all those unn-nameable conditions), you should watch this!

Functional Disorders

Medical school trains us well to investigate mechanical/structural abnormalities (e.g. SBO, carotid stenosis, hip fracture), assess for biochemical abnormalities (e.g. low hb, elevated a1c, hyperthyroidism), but does not prepare us for functional disorders-- which, by definition, have no specific tests. Functional disorders are diagnosed with symptom assessments, validated tools, in combination with negativing imaging/labs or other work-up. 

And yet, in primary care, we see a LARGE number of patients with functional disorders. Here are a few:

These patients are challenging. They bring up a lot in clinicians, and they don't always get the care they need. Sometimes they are left to steer their own ship (which doesn't reliably make them better), they get HUGE work ups (all of which turn out negative or equivocal), and they get labels that do not really apply, labels that are hard to remove. 

Dr. Jones reminded us that we use clinical judgement all the time to make diagnoses-- think a viral URI or a migraine. For these patients, we use illness scripts and confidence in our experience. This same notion applies to patients with functional disorders.

Central Sensitization

Central sensitization is a state of persistent CNS hyper excitability in which the brain and spinal cord amplify incoming signals beyond their objective magnitude. The "volume of the nervous system" is literally turned up. This is not psychological. It is driven by neuroinflammation, HPA axis dysregulation, synaptic plasticity in the dorsal horn, reduced descending inhibition, and more. This phenomenon is propagated via ACEs, chronic stress, trauma, perception, expectation, and neuroplasticity. 

I LOVE this fire alarm analogy!

Reminder: our job is NOT to keep searching for a fire.

We need to be able to recognize patterns of central sensitization:

• multi-system symptoms with no unifying biomedical lesion (though don't forget connective tissue and EDS)
• severity out of proportion to objective findings-- the gap is the signal amplification
• symptoms fluctuate with stress, sleep
• prior extensive negative work up but patient remains symptomatic
• presence of ACEs or chronic stress (which patient may not have insight into)
• hypervigilance: symptom tracking, googling, frequent visits, lots of messages
• sensory hypersensitivity: light, sound, temperature, touch, odors (more than just pain)

Language matters

When tests come back negative, avoid "everything is fine", "your tests are normal", "nothing is wrong", "maybe you're stressed". These statements do not explain what IS happening for the patient and leave them searching for another explanation. 

Communication is key!

Remember patients can have central sensitization AND something else!!!

Validated Tools for assessing for Central Sensitization include:

• Somatic Symptom Scale - 8. Gierk B et al. JAMA Intern Med. 2014.

• Eight items rated 0-4 over the past 7 days (GI, back pain, limb/joint pain, HA, CP/SOB, dizziness, fatigue, sleep)

• 8-11 = medium, 12-15 = high, 16-32 = very high.

• Each category increase is associated with 53% more healthcare visits

• CSI: Central Sensitization Inventory. Mayer TG et al. Pain Pract. 2012; Neblett R et al. J Pain. 2013

• Part A: 25 items, scored 0-100 

• Part B: Prior CSS diagnoses (unscored, clinical context)

• Cutoff ≥ 40: 81% sensitivity, 75% specificity for CS syndromes

• <30 = subclinical, 30-39 = mild, 40-49 = moderate, 50-59 = severe

Treatment of Central sensitization:

Education: normalize, reframe: "Your symptoms make sense to me. Let's try to understand what is going on." Discuss the context/ask the question: "What do you think is making your nervous system so sensitive?" Help change their relationship with their symptoms-- to decrease their fear. Remember, having somatic symptoms is part of living inside a body.

Nervous system retraining: mindfulness based pain reduction, breathing exercises, cold exposure (resets the mamalian dive reflex), singing, humming, yoga, meditation, massage (feet and neck)

Central sensitization and Chronic pain

• nociplastic pain happens over months to year; it can be at least partially reversed with desensitization of the oversensitized alarm
• patients have to be patient (months to years) to notice improvement
• patients and physicians benefit from moving away from "symptoms" into acceptance, understanding an rehabilitation>> goal is improving quality of life and increasing function
• movement is key: motion is lotion

Primary care needs united partnership with specialists.

We don't need to get it all done in one visit, even 2 minutes can help shift mindsets

We are not just asking patients to relax, we are helping them re-calibrate their nervous system.

Central sensitization does not invalidate the patient's experience, it only offers an explanation with evidence-based interventions.

Clinicians must NOT miss red flags

References:

Mohabbat AB & Wilkinson J (2023). Central sensitization: when it is not all in your head. Am Fam Physician. 101 (1):92-96

G. Lorimer Moseley & D Butler (2017). Explain pain supercharged: the clinician’s manual. 

tamethebeast.org (refer patients with chronic pain to this website)

Van Oosterwick J et al. (2013). Pain physiology education improves health status in fibromyalgia. Clin J Pain. 29(10):873-82.

Difficult (aka Dysregulated) Patient Encounters (Pimental, 7/29/26)

 A recording of this presentation is available HERE

***

Thanks to Dr. Britni Pimental, who gave us a fantastic presentation on Difficult Patient Encounters. She started by changing our word choice from "difficult" to "dysregulated".  When we label patients as difficult (angry, demanding, emotionally intense), we should be really calling them dysregulated-- shifting this label can help us shift in how we see patients. 

There were SO many pearls in this presentation, I definitely recommend listening to it yourself. But for the notes version:

It's not surprising that patients being seen in the clinic or hospital are dysregulated-- their nervous system is literally being stressed-- they are scared, in pain, feeling a loss of control, triggering old trauma and sensing systemic pressures.

When people get overwhelmed, their executive function goes down. They cannot listen. They cannot process high level medical information.

Clinician response to dysregulation can lead to to an unfortunate feedback loop:

Trigger>>>> Arousal>>>> Behavior>>>>Clinician Response>>>Trigger 

We are not neutral. We are human beings too.

Countertransference is the phenomenon in which our own emotional reaction to the patient is shaped by our own previous experiences. This can lead to helplessness, frustration, avoidance, over compensation, and assertion of control. 

We must strike a balance between empathy and limits/boundaries. Empathy does not require agreement. Most people do better with limits and effective boundary setting helps people who are dysregulated. Rather than being exclusive, empathy and boundaries are complementary.

3 steps to empathic boundary setting:

1. Validate the emotion
2. Set clear limits (without excessive justification-- see above, people's ability to tolerate info is low)
3. Offer alternatives (a small # of choices) to give control back

Restore regulation

Our tone, posture, body language and pacing will impact our patients' behaviors.  Clinician regulation is the most powerful de-escalation tool. Patients are highly attuned to non-verbal cues from clinicians (pacing, tone, body language)

The goal of de-escalation is NOT to win the argument or to convince the patient of a particular viewpoint. The goal is to maintain a functional relationship, create a safe and collaborative environment. 

Self-regulation for clinicians

-lower tone

-slow speech

-adapt a non-threatening posture

-sit down (if safe)

NURSE

Name

Understand

Respect

Support

Explore (options)

Offer choices as much as possible. Patients want to feel they have some say in their care.

Allow for pauses>> to avoid rushed decision-making. People need wiggle room. 

Ask open ended questions

Practice reflective listening

Avoid escalation

-avoid interrupting

-avoid power struggles

-avoid defensive responses

-avoid arguing the facts

A simple self-check re. countertransference:

What am I feeling right now?

What is this patient activating in me?

How is this helping/hurting their car?

Re-engage with your own executive function

-pause

-slow breathing

-relax your shoulders

-consciously slow your speech

-decrease your own physical arousal

RESPOND INTENTIONALLY RATHER THAN REACTIVELY 

The clinician-patient alliance builds trust, creates psychological safety and decreases emotional arousal. Regulation+ relationship + respect= safer encounter

Slow Medicine: finding the balance between knowledge, care and humanity (Paul Nguyen, 3/4/26)

A recording of this presentation is available HERE.

Many thanks to Dr. Paul Nguyen, who gave a moving and important Grand Rounds this week, which he entitled "Slow Medicine: Reflections from a 3rd year resident". What was so compelling about his presentation was how he brought us back to the basics of why most of us came to family medicine in the first place and wove in his reflections on where the rub occurs, and how we might approach it to make it better for patients and for us.

I particularly appreciated his inclusion of two Vietnamese proverbs, which I will leave here for your consideration:

Translation: You only know you're hungry after eating.

Meaning: You may only understand the importance of something once you have experienced it yourself.

Translation: Keep grinding the metal, one day it will turn into a needle.

Meaning: If you keep putting in the hard work, you may wind up with something beautiful and useful

In between these two beautiful proverbs, Dr. Nguyen introduced us to Victoria Sweet's book, Slow Medicine (if you haven't read it, both he and I highly recommend it!) and highlighted some of the core tenets she promotes in her book:

1) Gevuld (Dutch for "stuffed"), in the contest of medicine the idea that wounds can literally fill themselves in, that the body knows how to repair itself, that illness is not always an enemy to defeat. In this model, physicians are stewards of processes, not commanders of outcomes. 

2) Slow ≠ passive: medicine doesn't always require an intervention, time itself may heal. Sometimes the best intervention isn't doing more-- it's doing less. Not ignoring or neglecting but allowing the body's processes to work. 

3) Observation: observation is itself an active clinical skill, paying attention matters, and watching the body heal itself may be our only duty. Tolerating uncertainty is another part of our job. 

I particularly appreciated this slide from Dr. Nguyen, summarizing Sweet's argument and contrasting "fast medicine" (how we do things) to slow medicine (how he wants us to consider doing them):

In this section, he talked about the contrast of metrics vs. meaning, of productivity vs. presence and shared some of the data regarding burnout in the primary care workforce as well as patient perceptions of being held/cared for based on time spent with them. 

And for those of us who have been through residency and/or are witness to our residents going through residents in this era, we can related to these tensions, the feeling of not having enough time to sit with patients BUT wanting nothing more than to have the time to do so. The feeling of data overwhelm without a true understanding of the patient's lived experience.

Dr. Nguyen shared with us two meaningful patient experiences he has had during his residency training-- one that ended with a peaceful death, the other that left a patient without a diagnosis but getting better (who knows why? perhaps it was the time he spent with her?).

And, finally, some wisdom for his juniors and colleagues: