The Bodily Deficit in Contemporary Healthcare

In her chapter ‘Pragmatism in the Fray’, Monica Greco convincingly argues that ‘somatization’ is the iatrogenic product of Western medicine (Greco, Chap. 17 , this volume). The term somatization is used for the phenomenon that people still suffer from physical complaints even after doctors have been unable to find pathology. For example, you have suffered from pain in your joints for a long time, but all diagnostic tests are negative (the blood values are good, nothing shows up on scans). When somatization occurs, there is an illness without a disease. Because no underlying pathology is found in the biological body, it is assumed that the reason for, or cause of the complaints must be psychological. After all, within Western medicine we assume a distinction between body and mind. If there is not something wrong in the body, there must be something wrong in the mind. People who somatize are then said to be unable to psychologize—they resist a psychological explanation. Greco shows that this somatization is systemic within Western medicine. Doctors are trained to search for pathology in the biological body with the purpose of providing a pathological explanation for every condition. Physicians are not well prepared for situations where pathological explanations are not so obvious. Uncertainty is no part of the doctor’s habitus.