Today, we like to believe that we are rational about disease and immune to this kind of metaphorical thinking. But research shows that medicine is still riddled with such views, particularly when it comes to hard-to-identify illnesses, which are often seen as symptoms of some deeper psychological or existential problem. While advances in our understanding of mental illness constitute one of the great successes of twentieth-century medicine, patients with poorly understood illnesses confront an often reflexive categorization of their physical symptoms as mental ones—which presents a barrier to
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