As historian of medicine Charles Rosenberg has written, “In our culture, a disease does not exist as a social phenomenon until we agree that it does.” And whenever you hear a condition described as a “contested disease,” the odds are good that the “contest” is between, on the one hand, mostly women patients who believe their condition to be an organic one and, on the other hand, a medical establishment that assumes their “medically unexplained symptoms” are all in their heads.
