Medically unexplained symptoms: Headache and fibromyalgia

Headache is a clinical problem that affects most of the population. Migraine and tensionheadache are the most prevalent headache types. Headaches cause problems in individual functioning on various life areas such as family, school, business, social life and quality of life. Also, it is known that people who have headaches are often having psychological problems including depression and anxiety. Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain disease that affects seriously the daily life of people. Fibromyalgia is mostly seen with chronic fatigue, pain in muscles, difficulties in falling asleep etc. According to the American College of Rheumatology, people who have Fibromyalgia Syndrome experience pain in axial skeleton; in right and left sides, waist and at least 11 or 18 sensitive parts of the body. Besides that, symptoms like irritable bowel syndrome, heartburn, pain in jaw, irritability etc. could be seen in Fibromyalgia patients. Because of the ongoing pain, patients’ lives are interrupted and also their relationships are negatively affected by this chronic pain and so depression and anxiety become comorbid with chronic pain. This workshop will try to show ways of approaching what is recently called medically unexplained symptoms in general, and focus treating chronic migraine and fibromyalgia with EMDR. Participants will learn to use the treatment protocols and will be able to access the scales used in EMDR Therapy of chronic migraine and fibromyalgia and will be able to follow the video demonstrations of the sessions. Learning objectives ● Case formulation and treatment planning with medically unexplained symptoms ● Treatment protocol with chronic headache and fibromyalgia ● Managing relationship problems related to chronic pain

Conference

English

Emre Konuk

Konuk, E. (2018, June). Medically unexplained symptoms: Headache and fibromyalgia. In Neurobiology and research in EMDR. Presentation at the at the 19th EMDR Europe Association Conference, Strasbourg, France