ABSTRACT
Do traumatic events increase the risk of health problems? Over the past decade, researchers in a number of fields—health psychology, medicine, nursing, epidemiology, and public health—have found that they do. In the early stages of this work, researchers worked independently and did not communicate with one another, which limited the application of their findings. For example, researchers in nursing and several fields of medicine—gynecology, gastroenterology, rheumatology—began to notice, quite independently, that patients with pain often had a history of child or domestic abuse (Kendall-Tackett, Marshall & Ness, 2003; Sachs-Ericsson, Cromer, Hernandez, & Kendall-Tackett, this book). Unfortunately, for many years these findings were discounted because the pain syndromes were usually so-called functional conditions (such as irritable bowel syndrome or fibro-myalgia), meaning that lab or radiologic findings rarely matched a patient's level of pain or impairment from that pain. Because these findings were not placed in a broader context, symptoms were viewed as idiosyncratic, written off as primarily psychological in origin, and were generally not of interest to health care providers.
