Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick

by Maya Dusenbery

The assumption that these conditions are psychogenic—just modern labels for women’s age-old hysterical tendencies or, as one article put it, “old wine in new bottles”—means there isn’t much interest in studying them within the biomedical community. But only scientific research to uncover their biological mechanisms could rescue them from the wastebasket of the “medically unexplained.” As one researcher on multiple chemical sensitivity lamented in the nineties, “we are in a catch-22 situation. It is difficult to attract research money for a controversial condition and it is difficult to resolve the controversy without the necessary research.” In the meantime, skeptical doctors would point to the absence of consistent biological abnormalities as proof that there was “nothing wrong” with these patients, never mind that finding such abnormalities would have required research to look for them. Meanwhile, a good deal of what little research has been done on functional somatic syndromes has been focused on trying to confirm their psychological roots. On the whole, the evidence marshaled to attribute a psychogenic cause to such conditions is as speculative on the collective level as it is on the individual level. Countless studies have been done showing that patients with functional somatic syndromes have higher rates of depression and anxiety than healthy people. But this is true of patients with “explained” chronic diseases too. Rarely do such studies include a control group of ...