[The organism as a body-mind functional unit--consequences for psychosomatic medicine].

Psychosomatic medicine and research has always been more concerned with a broader and more integrated perspective on health, illness, and disease. It has attempted to study and understand persons in terms of the behaviors of interacting systems--the physiology of the organism. In the past 20 years a language has evolved that speaks of the organism's functions in dynamic, time-related terms. Both phenomenologically and mathematically, functions can be described in terms of rhythmus which, with disease, undergo change. In speaking this new language, some long-standing conceptual issues fade away, and others are clarified. At the same time, these new concepts force the investigator into new ways of designing experiments and analyzing data which may extend and modify them.