ArticleSociology of health & illness2012
The negotiation of the sick role: general practitioners' classification of patients with medically unexplained symptoms.
Article in Sociology of health & illness, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Legitimacy as Social Infrastructure: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis of the Literature on Legitimacy in Health and Technology.JMIR human factors · 2025Review
- The social representations of diagnosing Lyme disease.PloS one · 2023Article
- Austerity and identity formation: How welfare cutbacks condition narratives of sickness.Sociology of health & illness · 2022Article
- Discovering strengths in patients with medically unexplained symptoms - a focus group study with general practitioners.Scandinavian journal of primary health care · 2022Article
- Shifting between roles of a customer and a seller - patients' experiences of the encounter with primary care physicians when suspicions of cancer exist.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2021Article
- What is in a name? Autonomic imbalance and medically unexplained symptoms in Taiwan.Sociology of health & illness · 2021Article
- Sick or Sad? A Qualitative Study on How Dutch GPs Deal With Sadness Complaints Among Young Adults.Frontiers in sociology · 2021Article
- Association between GPs' suspicion of cancer and patients' usual consultation pattern in primary care: a cross-sectional study.The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners · 2019Article
- Patients' perspectives on GP interactions after cognitive behavioural therapy for refractory IBS: a qualitative study in UK primary and secondary care.The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners · 2018Article
- How general practitioners understand and handle medically unexplained symptoms: a focus group study.BMC family practice · 2018Article
- Recognition of patients with medically unexplained physical symptoms by family physicians: results of a focus group study.BMC family practice · 2016Article
- Towards a clinically useful diagnosis for mild-to-moderate conditions of medically unexplained symptoms in general practice: a mixed methods study.BMC family practice · 2014Article
- Developing Interpersonal Trust Between Service Users and Professionals in Integrated Services: Compensating for Latent Distrust, Vulnerabilities and Uncertainty Shaped by Organisational Context.International journal of integrated careArticle
- "My private theory is that it's all in the head": Understandings of chronic widespread pain among social workers from municipality job centers in Denmark.Health psychology openArticle
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In encounters between general practitioners (GPs) and patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS), the negotiation of the sick role is a social process. In this process, GPs not only use traditional biomedical diagnostic tools but also rely on their own opinions and evaluations of a patient's particular circumstances in deciding whether that patient is legitimately sick. The doctor is thus a gatekeeper of legitimacy. This article presents results from a qualitative interview study conducted in Denmark with GPs concerning their approach to patients with MUS. We employ a symbolic interaction approach that pays special attention to the external validation of the sick role, making GPs' accounts of such patients particularly relevant. One of the article's main findings is that GPs' criteria for judging the legitimacy of claims by those patients that present with MUS are influenced by the extent to which GPs are able to constitute these patients as people with social problems and problematic personality traits.
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