Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, United Kingdom.
Soc Sci Med. 2012 Dec;75(12):2362-9. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.09.010. Epub 2012 Sep 18.
Persistent medically unexplained symptoms (MUS)--including the many syndromes that fall under this umbrella--involve a discrepancy between professional knowledge and lay experience and are often associated with latent or explicit dynamics of conflict. Although this conflictual dimension has been amply documented, little critical attention has been paid to how nomenclature and classification feed into the conflictual dynamic and are informed by it in turn. In this paper I engage with this question from a social-theoretical perspective informed by the concept of performativity. The paper offers a critical review of debates around the medical terminology in use, and a discussion of the alternative terminology developed by social scientists. Based on these, I argue that medical and social scientific discourse unwittingly collude in a disavowal of the psychological dimension of 'MUS'. I then discuss the paradoxical character of this disavowal and suggest that it tends to perpetuate polemical modes of engagement around 'MUS'. I conclude with suggestions on how further research might counteract this tendency.
持续的医学无法解释的症状（MUS）——包括许多属于这一范畴的综合征——涉及专业知识和常识之间的差异，并且通常与潜在或显性的冲突动态有关。尽管这种冲突性维度已经得到充分记录，但很少有批判性的关注关注到命名法和分类如何反馈到冲突动态中，并反过来受到其影响。在本文中，我从社会理论的角度出发，利用表现性的概念来探讨这个问题。本文对当前使用的医学术语进行了批判性的回顾，并讨论了社会科学家提出的替代术语。在此基础上，我认为医学和社会科学话语在无意中共谋，否认了“MUS”的心理维度。然后，我讨论了这种否认的悖论特征，并认为它往往会使围绕“MUS”的争论模式永久化。最后，我提出了进一步研究如何克服这种趋势的建议。
