Fiona Duxbury's thoughtful response to my critique of the burgeoning medical preoccupation with domestic violence is a welcome departure from the familiar resort of promoters of this trend to evasion and caricature of opposing arguments.1,2 However, I believe that her advocacy of medical interventions in this area is based on a series of dubious assumptions and that such interventions may do more harm than good.
Dr Duxbury assumes that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a coherent disease entity, linking First World War soldiers with ‘shell-shock’ to contemporary victims of ‘intimate …