Medically Unexplained Illness: Gender and Biopsychosocial Implications

Medically unexplained illnesses are among the most common disorders in primary medical care today. Accordingly, there has been a recent surge of interest in the physiology of such illnesses as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, and multiple chemical sensitivity. But biomedical models can only go so far toward understanding a group of painful and often frustrating symptoms. These models are unable to fully answer such questions as: How are these vulnerabilities a…