creators_name: Kakunje, Anil creators_name: Puthran, S creators_name: Shihabuddeen, ITM creators_name: Chandran, MVV creators_id: anilpsychiatry@yahoo.co.in editors_name: Kakkilaya, Srinivas editors_id: Kakkilaya BS type: journale datestamp: 2015-02-21 14:36:05 lastmod: 2015-04-20 11:43:30 metadata_visibility: show title: ‘Gas Syndrome’ - A Culture Bound Syndrome ispublished: pub subjects: OJHAS full_text_status: public keywords: Gas; Syndrome; Culture abstract: Culture refers to the shared patterns of feelings, beliefs and behaviour that reflect in the way of living in a society. Culture uniquely influence the role functioning or psychosoical wellbeing of people living in a given society by exerting influence on their mind by their traditional health beliefs. Cultural factors influence understanding, presentation, diagnosis, management, course and outcome of many diseases, especially psychiatric disorders. Culture-bound syndromes seem to be episodic, dramatic and discrete patterns of behavioral reactions specific to a particular community that articulate both personal predicament and public concerns. Every culture provides explanations and causal attributions for somatic symptoms. One of the common complaints of persons coming to medical attention is ‘Gas’ or similar terminologies like ‘vayu’ etc. People attribute varied symptoms from abdominal discomfort, chest pain, headache, joint pains, back pain, somatic complaints to ‘Gas’. ‘Gas’ is reported to be the cause for the distress and the primary duty of the treating clinician is to relieve them of the gas. The problem of troubling Gas or vayu has been influencing Indian culture/tradition since ancient days. We do see a significant proportion of patients visiting varied specialists attributing all their problems to Gas. 'Gas Syndrome’ is proposed as a culture bound syndrome. date: 2014-02-20 date_type: published publication: Online Journal of Health and Allied Sciences volume: 2 number: 4(9) publisher: Kakkilaya BS refereed: TRUE referencetext: 1. Prakash O. Lessons for postgraduate trainees about Dhat syndrome. Indian J Psychiatry. 2007 Jul-Sep;49(3):208–210. 2. Sumathipala A, Siribaddana SH, Bhugra D. Culture-bound syndromes: the story of Dhat syndrome. The British Journal of Psychiatry. 2004;184:200-209. 3. Kirmayer LJ, Sartorius N. Cultural Models and Somatic Syndromes. Psychosom Med. Nov 1, 2007;69:832-840. 4. Kirmayer LJ, Young A. Culture and Somatization: clinical, epidemiological, and ethnographic perspectives. Psychosom Med. July 1, 1998;60(4):420-430. 5. Avasthi A, Kate N, Grover S. Indianization of psychiatry utilizing Indian mental concepts. Indian Journal of Psychiatry. 2013;55(6):136-144. 6. Gautam S, Jain N. Indian culture and psychiatry. Indian J Psychiatry. 2010 January;52(Supp l1):S309–S313. 7. Bang G. Indian Psychiatric Society. Abstracts of 59th Annual National Conference of Indian Psychiatric Society. Indian J Psychiatry 2007;49:1-60. 8. Ghosh JM. Unexplained somatic symptoms- Diagnostic window for mental disorders. J Indian Med Assoc. 2006 May;104 (5):255-260. citation: Kakunje, Anil and Puthran, S and Shihabuddeen, ITM and Chandran, MVV (2014) ‘Gas Syndrome’ - A Culture Bound Syndrome. [Journal (On-line/Unpaginated)] document_url: http://cogprints.org/9716/1/2013-4-9.pdf