Paper short abstract:

Fibromyalgia remains one of the most controversial conditions in present-day Western medical practice, despite increasing aetiological evidence. This paper explores the marginalisation of sensory experience in Western medical perceptions of fibromyalgia, from a neuroanthropological perspective.

Paper long abstract:

Fibromyalgia is a neurosensory condition in which individuals experience widespread pain, fatigue, cognitive difficulties and heightened sensory sensitivity. Pain, fatigue and cognitive symptoms have received the most attention in the medical literature, while sensory symptoms have often been overlooked and not infrequently cast as offshoots of perceived psychological illness or problems of everyday malaise. Even though neuro-imaging research over the past 15 years has identified neurological processes underlying the condition, its status as a medical diagnosis has remained highly contested. Some medical practitioners continue to view it as a psychological condition at best, and a made-up diagnosis attributed to malingerers at worst. This paper considers how a cultural bias towards an inorganic-organic and mind-body dichotomy has obscured the sensory as a phenomenological experience in fibromyalgia. It examines the historical and cultural processes that have contributed to sensory symptoms often being considered inconsequential, while highlighting how the few researchers and medical practitioners who have paid attention to these symptoms have made the most fruitful advances in understanding the condition. Utilising a neuroanthropological perspective, the paper explores the continuous interplay between a person’s neurology and the sociocultural world they inhabit. How might a person’s agency be affected if their sensory experiences are viewed as strange, irrelevant or unintelligible? The paper also considers the anthropological significance of the dissolution of the nature-nurture dichotomy in the emergent field of epigenetics, and identifies the human nervous system as a site of enculturation.