Medically unexplained physical symptoms (MUPS) or medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) are patient symptoms for which the treating physician, other healthcare providers, and research scientists have found no medical cause. The term does not necessarily imply that a physical cause does not exist, but rather notes that cause(s) for given symptoms are uncertain, unknown or disputed—there is no scientific consensus. A task force of the US National Institutes of Health states, "Medically unexplained syndromes (MUS) present the most common problems in medicine."
Estimates of primary care consultations with medically unexplained symptoms range from 15% to a high of 66% in specialty settings. Psychiatric co-morbidity is common, but symptoms may not be due exclusively to psychiatric factors and there may be a strong association between psychiatric morbidity and physical symptoms irrespective of whether they have a medical explanation or not. Association with depressive and anxiety disorders increases with the number of unexplained symptoms reported, but medically unexplained symptoms "as a whole" are not necessarily associated with depression and anxiety.
Physical symptoms have been associated with adverse psychosocial and functional outcome across different cultures, irrespective of etiology (either explained or unexplained). One use of the term MUS is in reference to the overlapping symptoms present in a variety of conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivity, somatoform disorder, and Gulf War Illness, which also share a significant overlap in treatment.
Read more about Medically Unexplained Physical Symptoms: History and Usage, Contested Causation, Treatment
Famous quotes containing the words unexplained, physical and/or symptoms:
“In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
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“Murderous desire, hatred, distrust are nowadays the accompanying signs of physical illness: so thoroughly have we embodied our moral prejudices.—Perhaps cowardice and pity appear as symptoms of illness in savage ages. Perhaps even virtues might be symptoms.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)