Semeiology--a well established and challenging paediatric speciality

Annual Research Review: Functional somatic symptoms and associated anxiety and depression – developmental psychopathology in pediatric practice

“…The biomedical model created a seismic shift in medical practice, differentiating the subjective and symptomatic suffering of patients, commonly referred to as illness , from the biophysical reality of disease , with the fundamental premise of the biomedical model being that illness is caused by disease (Weiner & Fawzy, 1989). Consequently, a core element of modern medical training involves learning how to determine if a given patient’s illness can be adequately explained by a concomitant disease, often by a process of exclusion or ‘ruling out’ (Chambers, 2003). This means that the first step in generating a differential diagnosis in a patient with presumably unexplained symptoms is to seriously consider the possibility of unrecognized physical disease.…”