Psychosomatic illness

Psychosomatic illness refers to illness or symptoms of illness with no known physical cause, which is believed to be the result of psychological factors. A number of different diseases were assumed to be psychomatic before medical science found biological evidence of abnormalities, for example 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 resulting in AIDS infections in people receiving the blood.

Notable studies

 * 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