Abdominal pain in children: the role of possible psychosocial disorders, Spatuzzo et al, 2021

Open access, https://www.europeanreview.org/article/25097

 

So this paper, if I understood it correctly, was studying abdominal pain in children and were specifically sorting patients into organic and functional groups, and then following up the functional group. There isn't a single mention of "We diagnosed X children with a functional disorder but it turned out that they had an organic cause after all." The idea that diagnosing functional disorder in anyone of any age is never wrong is absurd.

I'm feeling particularly mentally and cognitively challenged today, so I could have missed what I was looking for. Apologies if that is the case.

 

It's especially insulting to be denied research funding when you look at how much funding is wasted on trivial nonsense. This is basically a very expensive card-sorting thing where the outcome is rated based on whether the cards were sorted in the expected way.

The criteria separating the two are pretty much arbitrary, depending on how easy it is to see anything abnormal. Reminds me of how some physicians have no trouble taking identical patients with Long Covid and diagnosing one with LC and another with somatization disorder based on nothing but a positive test. Completely arbitrary process.

 

Abdominal migraine is only functional if you have already decided that migraine is a functional disorder. This paper is meaningless. It seems to be saying we sorted these kids according to our criteria and discovered that our criteria fit the way they were sorted. If there is anything else it eludes me.