In most of the examinations carried out at General Medicine outpatient clinics, physicians focus their attention on overt clinical data, characterized by clearly recognizable symptoms. Other symptoms, which could be defined as vague, such as chronic fatigue, sleep or appetite disorders, irritable bowel or constipation, tone or mood disorders, non-specific pain syndromes etc., are sometimes underestimated. These signs remain largely unexplained, i.e. they are not traced back to a precise cause, disease or disorder. In Anglo-Saxon literature they are identified as “MUS”, Medically Unexplained Symptoms. The appearance of MUS in general medicine patients is becoming increasingly frequent, and on several occasions
it has been pointed out how difficult it is to treat these symptoms, both from a diagnostic and, consequently, from a therapeutic standpoint. Therefore, it is important to emphasize the risk that a psychosocial diagnosis may imply: due to the objective difficulties related to medical investigation, hidden diseases may be overlooked. Most of the publications on this subject describe a situation whose complexity starts from the interview with the patient, who can hardly communicate his own discomforts and symptoms in a precise way.
The various traditional classification tools, based on patient interviews, do not seem to be particularly convincing. Due to the lack of concretely measurable data, they can hardly escape the patient’s subjective perception.
Significant progress in the assessment of MUS and their impact can be achieved if such interviews are complemented by precise tools that provide objective measurements of parameters showing the patient’s health.
