The Diagnostic Making of Fibromyalgia Syndrome

A ccording to Robert Bennett, one of the national figures in fibromyalgia syndrome (fms) research and treatment, fibromyalgia is a descriptive “construct developed by rheumatologists to account for a common group of patients that they see in their routine practice” (Bennett 1999a: 1). Although fms originated as an intellectual construct developed by rheumatologists to help in the study and treatment of a common group of patients, the idea of fms has since become reified at the level of both knowledge and experience. Much of this book is devoted to describing the phenomenon of fms at the experiential level. But before those who suffer could come to organize their experiences around the diagnosis of fms, the diagnosis itself had to be made and formalized as biomedical knowledge. This chapter describes how rheumatologists developed the construct or idea of fms and the subsequent debate about that idea within the institutional field of biomedicine, generally, and the subspecialty of rheumatology, in particular.