Arthur Barsky has a thought-provoking chapter entitled “The Validity of Bodily Symptoms in Medical Outpatients” in Arthur Stone’s important Science of Self Report (more available here):
“Although history-taking is the key to diagnosis in clinical medicine, and symptom relief is the goal of medical treatment, symptoms are often unreliable and invalid measures of the extent and [...]
While the anatomical basis of how nerve projections enable perception of the body is rather well known, physicians confront situations where patient verbal reporting about symptoms does not match models based on neurophysiological mechanisms. For instance, the Merck Manual Medical Library (2009) states:
“Painful stimuli from thoracic organs can produce discomfort described as pressure, gas, burning, [...]
