From medical school, we all know the secret code words: “functional”, “supertentorial”, “idiopathic”, and so forth. These, of course, are some of the ways that physicians may refer to patients for whom they cannot make a definitive diagnosis. Such patients, often labeled “somatisizers”, frequent primary care and specialty care physicians' offices as well as emergency rooms.They present with complaints of a variety of aches and pains, fatigue, insomnia, poor concentration, diarrhea, constipation, etc. Any one of these could be the initial signal of a serious medical problem but for this group of patients nothing can be found on physical examination or laboratory and blood tests.

Depending on the specialty of the physician, somatisizers receive a variety of diagnoses. Neurologists cite tension headache, rheumatologists cite fibromyalgia, internists cite chronic fatigue syndrome, gastroenterologists cite irritable bowel syndrome, and psychiatrists cite depression or an anxiety disorder. With the exception of the latter, no treatment has proven particularly successful, and many of these patients, regardless of the diagnosis, wind up being prescribed antidepressants. Does that mean that all somatisizers are suffering from underlying depression or anxiety? Some insist that is the case, but advocacy groups and many patients themselves resist that classification. Physicians are often afraid to suggest to patients that what they are complaining about is really due to a psychiatric problem, fearful of insulting the person. Some doctors, fearing they might overlook something, send the patient for increasingly sophisticated tests, running up healthcare costs and exposing patients to some risk. Inevitably, a test result comes back on the border of abnormality, thus, creating a reason to push forward with even more tests.