Medically unexplained symptoms and the meaning of health – a phenomenological clue

Abstract

Medically unexplained symptoms present a difficult management problem for doctors. Highlighting a concrete example and using a phenomenological approach, the author claims that at least part of this difficulty lies in the way doctors and their patients understand the concept of health. The prevalent biomedical model of illness employs a negative definition of health that, despite conferring operational validity to the concept, tends to be associated with an oppressive phenomenology. Re-attribution, when it is successful, works by engaging concretely with and restoring a prior phenomenological understanding of health. It is the latter that, the author argues, confers intelligibility upon what we mean by the concept.