ABSTRACT
Envisage experiencing a range of unpleasant symptoms such as sharp muscle pains, persistent stomach upsets, bad headaches and intense fatigue following a relatively minor illness or injury. As time goes by your symptoms get worse and although you visit your family doctor and various specialists a number of times, they cannot find anything wrong with you. You are convinced you are ill, but nobody seems to believe you. Undoubtedly it would be an extremely worrying and frustrating situation for you, feelings that are shared by a substantial number of patients. Recent surveys suggest that as many as 50 per cent of patients newly referred to outpatient specialist clinics present with medically unexplained symptoms such as these (Gureje et al., 1997; Nimnuan et al., 2001a). ‘Medically unexplained symptoms’ is a term used to describe physical symptoms which cannot be explained by observable biomedical pathology. When these symptoms are severe enough to significantly interfere with the patient’s daily functioning, he or she may be diagnosed with a functional somatic syndrome (FSS).
