ABSTRACT
In this chapter, ‘contested illness’ is examined as a conceptual category. In what ways are diseases contested? Are all illnesses contested? The argument is made that while virtually every disease contains some form of contestation, very few are what we might consider ontologically contested. That is to say, it is rare to find diseases whose existence, whose ‘realness’, is the site of conflict. Using the contrasting examples of chronic fatigue syndrome and asthma, compared against Swoboda’s criteria, the issues raised above are teased out and elucidated further, and a new, more extensive basis for demarcating contested diseases is proposed.
