ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the meaning of 'symptom' in relation to 'sign' from a semiotic viewpoint, together with its implications for medical theory and practice. Medicine deals with signs and symptoms. Liz is also involved in a continuous dialogue (internal and external) while trying to put her headache into context. During the last few decades, semiotics has grown into a vast discipline contributing especially to the study of signs and sign systems in language, culture, cybernetics, biology and medicine. Medical diagnosis can thus be considered to be an act of inference – that is, organisation, categorisation and deduction from the patient's symptoms and signs to medical concepts. In contemporary semiotics there are three main theoretical approaches to the problem of signs – dyadic, triadic and dialogic. Another approach in current medical practice is to treat medically unexplained symptoms as an indication of an underlying psychiatric condition, such as depression or anxiety.
