Suffering without Remedy: The Medically Unexplained Symptoms of Fibromyalgia Syndrome and Long COVID

Chiara Moretti () and Kristin Kay Barker
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Chiara Moretti: “Riccardo Massa” Department of Human Sciences for Education, University of Milano Bicocca, 1 Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 20126 Milano, Italy
Kristin Kay Barker: Department of Sociology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA

Social Sciences, 2024, vol. 13, issue 9, 1-25

Abstract: The term “Medically Unexplained Symptoms” (MUS) describes chronic symptoms for which medical investigations fail to reveal a specific pathology or biomarker. Even as MUS are among the most prevalent chronic health problems in the global north, patients who experience them reside in a nebulous space. Such nebulousness is heightened for women patients. Moreover, women report MUS at higher rates than men. In this review essay, we analyze the medicalization and feminization processes vis-à-vis MUS by focusing on two particular syndromes: Fibromyalgia (FMS) and Long COVID (LC). FMS and LC present clear parallels that allow us to trace an unhappy marriage of women and MUS. We demonstrate how the medical constructions of these two syndromes as knowledge categories are representations of medical uncertainty vis-a-vis women patients. We then scrutinize the resulting gendered consequences of these categories for the illness experience. We conclude our review by calling for a cultural reorientation in our thinking about MUS that centers a recognition that the origins and manifestations of a great deal of human suffering reside outside of medicine’s ways of knowing. In so doing, we connect to foundational claims in medical anthropology and sociology; namely, that illness is more than disease, and health cannot be achieved primarily via biomedical means.

Keywords: Medically Unexplained Symptoms; Long COVID; fibromyalgia; chronic illness; contested illness; women’s suffering; medicalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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