I’m not sure if the work is the same either way (I feel ambivalent on this question). If you know that no diagnosis is possible you have to simply alleviate the

I’m not sure if the work is the same either way (I feel ambivalent on this question). If you know that no diagnosis is possible you have to simply alleviate the symptoms as best is possible (I wish therapy was thought more of in this way, maybe it’s not all in your head but we can’t figure it out so let’s help you deal with it), if there is a possible silver bullet you need to keep chasing that even if that chasing increases the symptoms. But thinking this over that’s a false dichotomy, even if your doctors have exhausted their theories it doesn’t mean that some other doctor might not have an idea or there’s some variation on one of the existing theories that might explain things. Likewise, even if an exact diagnosis is found, few treatments are 100% effective in all cases, and most diagnosis have special cases which complicate things in sometimes baffling ways. Realistically, people usually need to both address symptoms directly and seek underlying causes to some degree when dealing with illness. That exact degree depends on the exact situation but it’s typically not 0% in either case. I would add something else, ultimately, especially with vague complicated symptoms which occur both in firmly physiological and firmly psychological disorders, the primary goal is typically to return function to ones life. Whether or not the mechanism to do so is real or not is of secondary importance especially if it doesn’t cause much harm relative to its benefit (which is not a simple matter to evaluate in cases like long term antibiotics for chronic pain, but I think is easier to evaluate for things like exercise (it might not cure the underlying cause, but it is likely to be indirectly helpful and unlikely to harmful so…))