Interpretation of Symptoms: Another Psychological Process Underlying Illness

As we all know, experience of illness not only perceive physically but also psychologically by the sufferer. Health, again, to its definition of physical, mental, and social well being, are not affected by the individual factors but also environmentally affected. Perception of illness and experience of illness sometimes share the same factors that will alter their intensity and as well as interpretation of the symptoms of the illness.

The interpretation of symptoms is also a heavily psychological process. Consider the following incident. At a large metropolitan hospital, a man in his late twenties came to the emergency room with the sole symptoms of a sore throat. He bought with him six of his relatives: his mother, father, sister, aunt and two cousins. Because patients usually go to an emergency room with only one other person and because a sore throat is virtually never seen in the emergency room, the staffs were understandably curious about the reason for his visit. There was much chuckling about how Italian families stick to together and how hey panic at any of a disturbance in health. But one particularly sensitive medical student reasoned that something more must have caused the man to come to he emergency room with his entire family in tow, so she probed cautiously but persistently during the intake interview with the patient. Gradually, it emerged that the young man's brother had died a year earlier of Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer that involves the progressive infection and enlargement of the lymph nodes. The brother's first symptom had been a sore throat, which he and the family had allowed to go untreated.

This poignant incident illustrates how important social and psychological factors can be in understanding people's interpretations of their symptoms. To this family, the symptom "sore throat" had special significance. It had a history for them that overrode its usual association with the beginning of a cold (which is, in fact, what the young man turned out to have). Moreover, it symbolized for them a past failure of the family to respond adequately to an emergency, a failure that they were determined not to repeat. What this incident also illustrates, albeit in a less direct way, is that individual, historical, cultural, and social factors all conspire to produce an interpretation of the symptoms experience. Other factors including, cultural difference, attention differences and situational difference, which can be quite complicated when all possible factors are taken into account to diagnose and understand the ill bearers.