dc.contributor.author | Rasmussen, Erik Børve | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2021-02-05T12:13:26Z | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2021-03-12T14:39:47Z | |
dc.date.available | 2021-02-05T12:13:26Z | |
dc.date.available | 2021-03-12T14:39:47Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2020-12-01 | |
dc.identifier.citation | Rasmussen. Making and managing medical anomalies: Exploring the classification of ‘medically unexplained symptoms’. Social Studies of Science. 2020;50(6):901-931 | en |
dc.identifier.issn | 0306-3127 | |
dc.identifier.issn | 1460-3659 | |
dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10642/10034 | |
dc.description.abstract | This article explores the making and management of anomaly in scientific work, taking ‘medically unexplained symptoms’ (MUS) as its case. MUS is a category used to characterize health conditions that are widely held to be ambiguous, in terms of their nature, causes and treatment. It has been suggested that MUS is a ‘wastebasket diagnosis’. However, although a powerful metaphor, it does neither the category nor the profession justice: Unlike waste in a wastebasket, unexplained symptoms are not discarded but contained, not ejected but managed. Rather than a ‘wastebasket’, I propose that we instead think about it as a ‘junk drawer’. A junk drawer is an ordering device whose function is the containment of things we want to keep but have nowhere else to put. Based on a critical document analysis of the research literature on MUS (107 research articles from 10 medical journals, published 2001–2016), the article explores how the MUS category is constituted and managed as a junk drawer in medical science. | en |
dc.language.iso | en | en |
dc.publisher | SAGE Publications | en |
dc.relation.ispartofseries | Social Studies of Science;Vol 50, Issue 6 | |
dc.rights | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License | en |
dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
dc.subject | Ambiguities | en |
dc.subject | Anomalies | en |
dc.subject | Classifications | en |
dc.subject | Medical sciences | en |
dc.subject | Medically unexplained symptoms | en |
dc.title | Making and managing medical anomalies: Exploring the classification of ‘medically unexplained symptoms’ | en |
dc.type | Journal article | en |
dc.type | Peer reviewed | en |
dc.date.updated | 2021-02-05T12:13:26Z | |
dc.description.version | publishedVersion | en |
dc.identifier.doi | https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312720940405 | |
dc.identifier.cristin | 1827337 | |
dc.source.journal | Social Studies of Science | |