Abstract

DEL MONACO, Romina. Headaches, symptoms and disease: a social approach to clinical construction of migraine. Intersecciones antropol. [online]. 2012, vol.13, n.2, pp.501-511. ISSN 1850-373X.

In this article, I analyze how migraine's diagnosis, as a chronic disease, is constructed by biomedicine. During the year 2010 I interviewed neurologist and patients from a public hospital in Buenos Aires City. There are two things that difference migraine from other chronic diseases: there is no factual evidence of migraine's existence and it does not has a certain etiology and efficient treatment. So, from a socio-anthropological perspective this research tries to analyze how neurologists construct and legitimize this pain as a real disease even though, according biomedicine's paradigm, there is no factual evidence of it. This article argues that migraine as a medical disease depends on physical and emotional experiences, perceptions and words of people with a special kind of headaches. In that sense, not only symptoms (headaches, vomits, among others) became a central issue in the construction of migraine, but also they are the only evidence that biomedicine has in order to diagnose and treat it. So, one of the questions that try to guide this paper is: what is left in migraines beyond headaches?

Keywords : Migraine; Chronic disease; Biomedicine; Diagnosis; Physical and emotional experiences of patients.

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