American Medicine Is Still Stuck in the 1950s!

In the musi­cal Guys and Dolls, the char­ac­ter named Ade­laide has a psy­cho­so­mat­ic cold. As she explained,

The aver­age unmar­ried female
basi­cal­ly inse­cure
due to some long frus­tra­tion may react
with psy­cho­so­mat­ic symp­toms
dif­fi­cult to endure
affect­ing the upper res­pi­ra­to­ry tract.

Guys and Dolls is a quaint arti­fact from the 1950s. Nev­er­the­less, the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Association’s Diag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­u­al still gives doc­tors per­mis­sion to say, “It’s all in your head” if they can’t imme­di­ate­ly fig­ure out what’s wrong with you. An arti­cle of mine that was pub­lished in the jour­nal Med­ical Hypothe­ses says that doc­tors can­not make that kind of diag­no­sis with­out mak­ing an error in rea­son­ing. For that rea­son, I argue that the APA should remove con­ver­sion dis­or­der and som­a­ti­za­tion dis­or­der from the DSM. The fifth edi­tion of the DSM (DSM-5) is due in 2013.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Amer­i­can Med­i­cine Is Still Stuck in the 1950s!”