Neurotic vs extroverted personality/abdominal pain vs malaise

[Paxxy]

I was only diagnosed with Crohns at the start of the week. But the night I got home from the colonoscopy there was an interesting Michael Mosley documentary on called "Guts: The strange and Mysterious World of the Human Stomach".

There was some interesting new resarch presented. People feel gastric pains differently depending on their personality types. People who are closer to being extroverted feel gut pain as a psychological discomfort while people who are closer to neurotic feel gut pain as a physical pain.

Now I am new to understanding what my Crohns does to me, but I very rarely feel physical pain in my guts. What I do get a lot of is feeling like ****, or general malaise after eating. I'm wondering if this is the psychological manifestations of gut pains? I wouldn't call my self extraverted but I probably fall closer to being extraverted than neurotic, although I have tendencies towards both.

Do you get general malaise or physical pain more? Are you more neurotic or extraverted?

 

[UnXmas]

Was this a new documentary? It sounds vaguely familiar to me and I think I might have seen it some times ago. I didn't pay enough attention to remember the details of the evidence they used, but I remember not being that convinced by it, which was the same impression I got reading your post summarising the findings.

I guess I resist the idea that people can fit into well defined categories. I think all my bad experiences with doctors telling me my physical symptoms were psychological make me wary of anything that suggests the psychological can manifest as physical or vice versa, so my experiences may be adding bias to my impression of the idea.

But funnily enough my own case supports the theory - I'm neurotic and feel my pain physically.

 

[UnXmas]

By the way, is neurotic the opposite of extroversion? I would have thought it would be introversion. :confused2:

 

[Paxxy]

It would be less than a year old. The documentary also had Mosley swallowing a camera and becoming a museum exhibit.

You might be able to watch it here http://www.sbs.com.au/documentary/program/1214

I found the peer reviewed research and it doesn't seem all that convincing.

http://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(11)00765-7/abstract

Watching it again, I don't think my summary is all that accurate. I probably should refrain from commenting on something I watched in a post general anesthetic haze.

 

[UnXmas]

Yes I think that is the documentary I saw. I'm not sure I was paying much attention, but I remember some of it.