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

by Maya Dusenbery

And yet, many doctors do apparently believe that they can somehow intuit whether a patient’s symptoms will turn out to be “medically unexplained”—and do so quite quickly. In a 2016 Dutch study, family physicians reported that they suspected patients’ symptoms were MUS if they had many symptoms and had had lots of previous doctor’s visits and referrals. They also considered the “subtle feelings” the patients provoked in them to be a clue. One of those feelings was confusion. One doctor explained, “I believe I know what is going on within 30 [seconds], like many of us. When I think within 2 [minutes] ‘I do not have a clue of what is going on here,’ then I start to think ‘This can be [MUS].’” The other feeling was “irritation” at the patient. Most of the respondents “stated that when they did not feel empathy for their patients, they were more often inclined to recognize symptoms as [MUS].”