In the absence of scientific consensus about contested illnesses such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS), and Gulf War Syndrome (GWS), physicians must make sense of competing accounts and develop practices for patient evaluation. A survey of 800 United States physicians examined physician propensity to diagnose CFS, MCS, and GWS, and the factors shaping clinical decision making. Results indicate that a substantial portion of physicians, including nonexperts, are diagnosing CFS, MCS, and GWS. Diagnosing physicians manage the uncertainty associated with these illnesses by using strategies that enhance bounded rationality and aid in thinking beyond current disease models. Strategies include consulting ancillary information sources, conducting analytically informed testing, and considering physiological explanations of causation. By relying on these practices and paradigms, physicians fit CFS, MCS, and GWS into an explanatory system that makes them credible and understandable to them, their patients, and the medical community. Findings suggest that physicians employ rational decision making for diagnosing contested illnesses, creating a blueprint of how illnesses lacking conclusive pathogenic and etiological explanations can be diagnosed. Findings also suggest that patients with contested illnesses might benefit from working with physicians who use these diagnostic strategies, since they help manage the complexity and ambiguity of the contested illness diagnostic process and aid in diagnosis. In addition, findings provide a window into how emerging illnesses get diagnosed in the absence of medical and scientific consensus, and suggest that diagnosing physicians advance the legitimacy of controversial illnesses by constructing the means for their diagnosis.

This study examines the social influences that shape how individuals come to believe they have a contested illness and the explanations of illness legitimacy that result. Chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivities, and Gulf War syndrome have all been identified as contested illnesses because their etiology, diagnosis, and prevalence are controversial. Narratives from in-depth interviews with 22 individuals who identified themselves as having these illnesses were analysed using a grounded theory approach. Findings indicate that claiming medical legitimacy for a contested illness involves a difficult and protracted process in which sufferers develop social representations of the etiology, diagnostic criteria, trajectory, and treatment of their illnesses. Study results shed light on the role of sufferers in the social construction of the medical and cultural legitimacy of emerging illnesses. Qualitative Research in Psychology 2006; 3: 233 Á 251

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