Is pain a somatic symptom?

The grouping of symptoms into "somatic" or "physical" on the one hand and " mental", "somatoform" or "psychological" on the other are vestiges of an er a in medicine when it seemed useful to divide all the phenomena of disease into two groups-one related to the soma and other to the psyche. Today, thi s division is becoming obsolete and is harmful. Obsolete, because we are di scovering changes in the tissues or in biochemical and immunological functi ons of the body in people with mental disorders, and because psychological complaints are frequent in all physical illnesses. Harmful, because the lab els "psychological", "psychogenic", or "somatoform" are so loaded with conn otations of being simulations or complaints about nothing that patients are unlikely to recive the help they need.