Healthcare professionals assumptions about medically unexplained symptoms need to change

Throughout human history there have always been people whose medical symptoms could not be understood by the science and medicine of the time. For thousands of years, and even in some countries today such people were often considered to be witches or possessed by demons or evil spirits. Many women who reported symptoms were often considered to be hysterical or psychotic. This meant that these people were often killed, locked up in mental institutions, or subjected to dangerous and harmful treatments for conditions such as epilepsy, migraines, tumors, and other conditions that modern medicine now understands the mechanisms behind. Although for the most part in developed first world countries people who experience symptoms that our current technologies and scientific understanding can not yet detect or explain are not accused of being witches, but instead there symptoms are thought to have a psychogenic Origin.

Several decades ago conditions such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, semicircular canal dehiscence, were considered to be psychogenic and even listed in the DMZ of mental health conditions. This meant that these patients were treated the same as psychiatric patients who had emotional disorders. Through patient lead advocacy, lead research, and advancements in medicine, technology, and science these conditions are now recognized to have actual physical causes and mechanisms. Throughout my own life time, when I was first diagnosed with hyperacusis in elementary school it was thought to be an emotional disorder that could be “cured” with sound exposure. Now ten years later and new research is coming out to show that there are actual neurological and otological mechanisms responsible for the pain that people with hyperacusis experience from noise including Type II neurons in the cochlear, middle ear muscles, and the trigeminal nerve. Again these new discoveries were thanks to advocacy from the patient lead organization Hyperacusis Research and the exponential rate at which technology and scientific knowledge is increasing. Unfortunately even in our modern world in which information can be spread so quickly, the communication between researchers and clinicians is lacking not only for hyperacusis but other rare, and poorly understood conditions as well. This means that these patients continue to be subjected to harmful and painful treatments that either do nothing or worsen their conditions.

Doctors believing and labeling conditions that our current technologies and sciences are not advanced enough to detect or understand as psychogenic is at its core the same concept as how people labeled people with unexplainable symptoms at the time witches or possessed. The medical world refuses to acknowledge that they don’t yet have the ability to understand the cause of their patients symptoms and not wanting or willing to look like or say they don’t know or understand the pathology behind something. Given the history of so many physical symptoms that were in different ways terms to be generated from the patients mind now understood and recognized as medical conditions, and the fact that scientists and researchers admit that we understand very little about the human brain and structures and activity below the cortical surface, and don’t even have a functional model of the human auditory system, the medicine profession needs to not be so quick to label physical symptoms they don’t understand as psychogenic.