Psychosomatic illness

Psychosomatic or psychogenic illness refers to illness or symptoms of illness with no known physical cause, which is believed to be the entirely result of psychological factors, with no underlying biological cause. Psychosomatic medicine refers to the impact of medical illness on the minds, and the impact of psychological disorders on the body.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and fibromyalgia are sometimes incorrectly referred to as psychomatic illnesses, or alternatively as medically unexplained physical symptoms (usually meaning partly physiological), by a number of clinicians or researchers, both in academic publications and the mainstream press, despite being classified as a neurological disease, and musculoskeletal disease respectively.

Psychologization
A number of different diseases were assumed to be psychomatic before medical science found biological evidence of abnormalities, this process of psychologization has previously affected patients with many different illnesses, including Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, Lyme disease and AIDS. Significant harm can be caused by psychosomatic assumptions of an illness, in the case of AIDS, patients with AIDS were allowed to donate blood because it was assumed that no physical disease was present, which resulted in AIDS infections in people receiving the blood.

Notable articles

 * 1997, Chronic fatigue syndrome--a disease entity or an unspecified psychosomatic disorder? (in German) (Abstract - in English)
 * 2017, Contesting the psychiatric framing of ME/CFS (Full text)

Letters, articles and talks

 * 2000, Functional somatic syndromes
 * 2013, Disease-modifying therapies for nonrelapsing multiple sclerosis: Absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence