Medically Unexplained Symptoms Quotes

Psychologisation describes the emphasis on psychological factors where there is little or no evidence to justify it (1). It's a process where relevant findings are ignored or downplayed in favour of data from incomplete examinations, flawed research or anecdotal reports.
In a clinical context, differential diagnoses may be dismissed prematurely while psychological explanations are readily accepted.
Psychologisation does not refer to situations where there is sound evidence that psychological factors play a significant role, or where all the arguments are discussed and the psychological explanations are deemed the most persuasive. ~ Ellen Goudsmit

To be sure, depression, anxiety, and prolonged stress can cause specific physical symptoms, but these symptoms are not limitless, nor are they actually unexplained. When doctors invoke these labels for symptoms as diverse as vomiting, paralysis, and sever, unending pain, it is the concept of the somatoform disorders--hysteria dressed up in modern garb-- that allows them to do so. ~ Maya Dusenbery

Somatic Symptoms:
People with Complex PTSD often have medical unexplained physical symptoms such as abdominal pains, headaches, joint and muscle pain, stomach problems, and elimination problems. These people are sometimes most unfortunately mislabeled as hypochondriacs or as exaggerating their physical problems. But these problems are real, even though they may not be related to a specific physical diagnosis. Some dissociative parts are stuck in the past experiences that involved pain may intrude such that a person experiences unexplained pain or other physical symptoms. And more generally, chronic stress affects the body in all kinds of ways, just as it does the mind. In fact, the mind and body cannot be separated. Unfortunately, the connection between current physical symptoms and past traumatizing events is not always so clear to either the individual or the physician, at least for a while. At the same time we know that people who have suffered from serious medical, problems. It is therefore very important that you have physical problems checked out, to make sure you do not have a problem from which you need medical help. ~ Suzette Boon

As one patient with chronic fatigue syndrome put it, 'The difference between a crazed neurotic and a seriously ill person is simply a test. ~ Maya Dusenbery

If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community. And we have to focus on what actually works ~ Barack Obama

Good health is not the absence of symptoms, it is the presence of peace. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

It was a symptom of the insanity of human beings in a cosmos obviously designed for them to live in, but which they industriously prepare to make unlivable. ~ Murray Leinster

The strongest symptom of wisdom in man is his being sensible of his own follies. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

In 1944-1945, Dr Ancel Keys, a specialist in nutrition and the inventor of the K-ration, led a carefully controlled yearlong study of starvation at the University of Minnesota Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. It was hoped that the results would help relief workers in rehabilitating war refugees and concentration camp victims. The study participants were thirty-two conscientious objectors eager to contribute humanely to the war effort. By the experiment's end, much of their enthusiasm had vanished.
Over a six-month semi-starvation period, they were required to lose an average of twenty-five percent of their body weight." [...] p193

p193-194
"...the men exhibited physical symptoms...their movements slowed, they felt weak and cold, their skin was dry, their hair fell out, they had edema. And the psychological changes were dramatic. "[...]
p194
"The men became apathetic and depressed, and frustrated with their inability to concentrate or perform tasks in their usual manner. Six of the thirty-two were eventually diagnosed with severe "character neurosis," two of them bordering on psychosis. Socially, they ceased to care much about others; they grew intensely selfish and self-absorbed. Personal grooming and hygiene deteriorated, and the men were moody and irritable with one another. The lively and cooperative group spirit that had developed in the three-month control phase of the experiment evaporated. Most participants lost interest in group act ~ Michelle Stacey

Just as a detective builds a case by adding evidence, or a physician arrives at a diagnosis by considering multiple symptoms and tests, anyone can arrive at a meaningful conclusion based on a cumulative case. One of the strongest evidences that Christian theism's truth-claims are correct rests in its ability to account for and justify the many diverse and undeniable realities of life. ~ Kenneth Samples

Dr Stewart Wolf took the placebo effect to the limit. He took two women who were suffering with nausea and vomiting, one of them pregnant, and told them he had a treatment which would improve their symptoms. In fact he passed a tube down into their stomachs (so that they wouldn't taste the revolting bitterness) and administered ipecac, a drug that which should actually induce nausea and vomiting. Not only did the patients' symptoms improve, but their gastric contractions - which ipecac should worsen - were reduced. His results suggest - albeit it in a very small sample - that a drug could be made to have the opposite effect to what you would predict from the pharmacology, simply by manipulating people's expectations. In this case, the placebo effect outgunned even the pharmacological influences. More ~ Ben Goldacre

I would advise him that is actually melancholy not to read this tract of Symptoms, lest he disquiet or make himself for a time worse, and more melancholy than he was before. ~ Robert Burton

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance. ~ Roland Barthes

You know how most illnesses have symptoms you can recognize? Like fever, upset stomach, chills, whatever.
Well, with manic depression, it's sexual promiscuity, excessive spending, and substance abuse - and that just sounds like a fantastic weekend in Vegas to me! ~ Carrie Fisher

As a young man, he had instinctively husbanded the freshness of his powers. At the time, it was too soon to see that this freshness was giving birth to vivacity and gaiety, and shape to the courage needed to forge a soul that does not pale, no matter what life brings, regards life not as a heavy burden, a cross, but merely as a duty, and does battle with it with dignity.
He had devoted much mental care to his heart and its wise laws. Observing the reflection of beauty on the imagination, both consciously and unconsciously, then the transition from impression to emotion, its symptoms, play, and outcome and looking around himself, advancing into life, he derived for himself the conviction that love moves the world like Archimede's lever, that it holds as much universal and irrefutable truth and good as misunderstanding and misuse do hypocrisy and ugliness.
p. 494 ~ Ivan Goncharov

There is no cure for prions. They are a protein-based disease that, among other things, targets and transforms your brain. The symptoms reveal themselves differently in each host, and you might go months or you might go years before you realize you're infected. ~ Benjamin Percy

If we cannot define stupidity, at least we can trace most human misfortunes and weaknesses to it. Its manifestations are legion, its symptoms are endless. ~ Richard Armour

If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings. ~ Ivan Klima

[Author's Note:] When my grandmother came to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1940s, she was a beautiful, glamorous woman from a wealthy family in the capital city, and the young bride of a dashing naval officer. She expected to be received as such. Instead, she found that people here had a very reductionist view of what it meant to be Puerto Rican, of what it meant to be Latinx. Everything about her confused her new neighbors: her skin tone, her hair, her accent, her notions. She wasn't what they expected a boricua to be.

My grandmother spent much of her adult life in the States but didn't always feel welcome here. She resented the perpetual gringo misconceptions about her. She never got past that resentment, and the echoes of her indignation still have some peculiar manifestations in my family today. One of the symptoms is me. Always raging against a perceived slight, always fighting against ignorance in mainstream ideas about ethnicity and culture. I'm acutely aware that the people coming to our southern border are not one faceless brown mass but singular individuals, with stories and backgrounds and reasons for coming that are unique. I feel this awareness in my spine, in my DNA.

So I hoped to present one of those unique personal stories - a work of fiction - as a way to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear. And in so doing, I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate. When we see migrant ~ Jeanine Cummins

As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

I always think, medically ... you really have to be your advocate. You have to be able to back up everything that you're feeling with some information and protect yourself through the world of hospitals and doctors' offices, so the more information the better. ~ Lisa Edelstein

The women of the Green Belt Movement have learned about the causes and the symptoms of environmental degradation. They have begun to appreciate that they, rather than their government, ought to be the custodians of the environment. ~ Wangari Maathai

My heart might very well beat itself from my chest," she whispered, "and 'tis difficult to breathe."
"How odd." Passion thickened his voice. "I seem to be suffering the same symptoms. Does anything else plague you?"
"A terrible weakness," she whispered shakily. "If you let me go, I am not entirely certain I shall be able to stand."
He buried his face in her neck. "Then I shall never let you go. ~ Jo Grafford

Common Symptoms of Candida Albicans Overgrowth ~ Jane Remington

We are trying to get marijuana reclassified medically. If we do that, we'll be using the issue as a red herring to give marijuana a good name. ~ Keith Stroup

Eating disorders are prevalent among women who were sexually abused as children. They seem to have components of other symptoms such as obsessions, compulsions, avoidance of food, and anxiety, and they primarily include a distorted body image and feelings of body shame.
For some women, eating disorders are related to the loss of control over their bodies during the sexual abuse and serve as a means of feeling in control of their bodies now. Eating disorders can also be indicative of the developmental stage and age at which the sexual abuse began. Women with anorexia and bulimia report that they were sexually abused either at the age of puberty or during puberty, when their bodies were beginning to develop and they felt a great deal of body shame from the abuse. By contrast, women with compulsive eating report that the sexual abuse occurred before the age of puberty; they used food for comfort. ~ Karen A. Duncan

It's not enough to tackle just the symptoms of poverty. You have to tackle the causes of poverty. ~ George Osborne

If there is a lesson here it has to do with humility. For all our vaunted intelligence and complexity, we are not the sole authors of our destinies or of anything else. You may exercise diligently, eat a medically fashionable diet, and still die of a sting from an irritated bee. You may be a slim, toned paragon of wellness, and still a macrophage within your body may decide to throw in its lot with an incipient tumor. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The effect of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the user's experience and behavior depends in part on his or her personality and genetic predisposition, which can vary to a great extent from person to person. As symptoms of psychiatric disorders can sometimes be elicited after one-off use, people with a genetic tendency to depression or psychosis should be discouraged from using psychoactive mushrooms. ~ John Rush

But why does it matter what we call it, as long as there is concerted action to respond to and prevent such crimes? It matters because if we really want to fix something that is broken, if we want to heal these fractures in our society, then we need to understand their causes. If we do not, then we will forever continue to place giant sticking plasters over the wounds left by this violence, trying to bandage over losses that can never be replaced. As long as this violence continues, it is obviously the case that we do have to address the symptoms, but my argument is that we must also address the causes if we want a long-term reduction or even, perhaps, the eventual eradication of male violence against women. ~ Finn Mackay

That's my problem with new-age stuff. In common with many irrational views it harks back to a sense of something ancient while rejecting anything provably historical. It's like the miserable concept of Original Sin. There seems to be an obsession with the idea that there were ancient humans, uncorrupted by their capricious intellects, who lived in the 'right way'.
They didn't eat too much dairy or any wheat. They didn't sit down too long for their spines or walk around in posture-ruining shoes. They didn't consume too many sugars or fats for their unblemished guts to digest, or pop painkilling and antibiotic tablets to deal with the short-term symptoms of long-term problems that should be dealt with by wholesale lifestyle change. They didn't drink or smoke. They were perfect and we should sling out all our stuff and emulate them. Except they had an average life expectancy of about 18 and the planet could only support a few hundred thousand of them. Apart from that, good plan. ~ David Mitchell

So, even though your symptoms, at times, may feel all encompassing and completely out of your control, your awareness inserts a new variable, and with it comes the potential for change. ~ C. Alexander Simpkins

Along with the violent tonic-clonic seizure, it turned out I had also been experiencing complex partial seizures because of overstimulation in my temporal lobes, generally considered to be the most "ticklish" part of the brain. The temporal lobe houses the ancient structures of the hippocampus and the amygdala, the parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory. The symptoms from this type of seizure can range from a "Christmas morning" feeling of euphoria to sexual arousal to religious experiences. ~ Susannah Cahalan

The very first few days when you actually start having symptoms of falling for someone special, are the days of heavenly bliss and unreasonable madness. ~ Abhijit Naskar

'Recovery' is an idea whose time has come. At its heart is a set of values about a person's right to build a meaningful life for themselves, with or without the continuing presence of mental health symptoms. ~ Geoff Shepherd

It turns out that unexplained positivity lasts longer than positivity we analyze until we fully understand it. ~ Barbara Fredrickson

Perhaps most important to keep in mind, however, is that it can be impossible to distinguish between the symptoms of MS and those of gluten sensitivity. ~ Shari Lieberman

One of the symptoms of a losing streak is a turnover of top executives. It's a revolving door. ~ Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Can we accept the unexplained, the loss,
The crushing agony, and hold us still.
And nowhere is that clearer vision given
Which pierces a bewildering providence,
And opens windows upon highest heaven,
But where we see Suffering Omnipotence. ~ Amy Carmichael

A well-trained mind responded to symptoms.
An ordinary mind reacted after it happened. ~ Toba Beta

One out of six women are toxic with mercury. Mercury comes out of coal plants and chlorine plants. I am toxic, I deal with symptoms, children are born with, you know, autism - there is an epidemic in this country. This is like, the air that we breath. ~ Daphne Zuniga

He felt as if he were under an intolerable physical strain, as if his body were likely at any moment to fly to pieces. Other strange physical symptoms came to trouble him. An unpleasant odour lingered in his nostrils, as if he could literally smell the sulphur of the pit; and he had from time to time the curious illusion that his flesh was turning black. He had to look continually at his hands to be sure that it was not so. Nightmares troubled him, waking and sleeping - and one bad dream conjured up another, running from box to box to release its fellows. The world around him seemed to have become equally mad and hateful. The newspapers were full of stories of grotesque violence and unnatural crimes. He knew neither how to go on nor what to do to bring these horrors to an end. ~ Iris Murdoch

Psychosis does not live in the head. It lives in the in-between of family members, and in the in-between of people," Salo explained. "It is in the relationship, and the one who is psychotic makes the bad condition visible. He or she 'wears the symptoms' and has the burden to carry them." (341) ~ Robert Whitaker

Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness to our society. ~ Earl Warren

People are symptoms of dreams ~ Karen Russell

It was mad. It was inconceivable. Anthony began to detect in himself the symptoms of a disease he had sworn never to acquire
lovesickness
and thus berated himself for a clodpoll to so fall into the gilded trap. ~ Dominique Frost

As much as possible, and this as quickly as possible: that is what the great mental and emotional illness craves that is variously called "present" or "culture," but that is actually a symptom of consumption. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In those who rest on their unshakable faith, pharisaism and fanaticism are the unmistakable symptoms of doubt which has been repressed. Doubt is not overcome by repression but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible. ~ Paul Tillich

...when it comes to the strange and unexplained, it's important to keep an open mind. ~ Victoria Schwab

The rates of venereal disease soared and the 82nd Airborne opened a medically certified brothel in Trapani under a supervising officer soon known as the Madam; ~ Rick Atkinson

Being a physician, you can either treat the symptoms or cure the disease. This Congress has been treating the symptoms. It's time we cure the disease and take care of the problems that are underlying our poor economy. ~ Joe Heck