even before Morgellons came up explicitly in this article, i was reminded of Leslie Jamison's narrative essay The Devil's Bait, in which she grapples with questions of medical testimony from the "widely considered illegitimate" angle.
This isn’t an essay about whether Morgellons disease is real. [...] It’s an essay about what kinds of reality are considered prerequisites for compassion. It’s about this strange sympathetic limbo: Is it wrong to speak of empathy when you trust the fact of suffering but not the source?