[A few reflections of a clinician on the language of the somatic symptoms]

This paper presents a series of reflections upon the clinician's activity. His duty begins by having to understand what the words uttered by the patient mean and by assigning a clinical value to somatic symptoms. While the former of these tasks means that the patient must be followed in his particular way of self-diagnosis of his somatic perceptions and in his particular way of inventing his physical reality, the latter is rather easier and it's based on the use of a preformed model of the localization, intensity, duration, sequence and normal interpretation of the symptoms. The author proposes different metaphors in order to understand the abductive method used by clinicians faced with patients' demands.