BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

But Sharpe has a pathology, he has become addicted to his own ignorance, digging in his heels, unwilling to surrender it.

 

Somewhere in there is a point and I'm not sure it's lost in translation, I think the confusion is in its original Swedish.


https://lakartidningen.se/opinion/debatt/2020/10/apropa-stressreflexer-och-covid-19-symtom/

I am fully unable to grasp the thought process that leads to people arguing that whiplash, WHIPLASH, is psychological. It's such an odd delusion.

Honestly I am all up for psychosomatic ideologues saying out loud what they mean because nothing invalidates the ideology better than having people hear what they are actually saying and finding it hard to reconcile this nonsense with medical practice is supposed to be.

 

I wrote a bit about it a while ago, about the politics (insurance companies) that redefined whiplash in Sweden. Was a big debate back then...
https://www.s4me.info/threads/struc...gs-and-social-media.11138/page-50#post-272180

 

I don't see SW 'coming to the rescue' on that thread, but there are quite a few replies. More people for MS to block.

 

"Pathology" seems to be a word with varied uses. Is it clear to anyone, possibly including himself, what Sharpe means? Is it the truism that when the cause of a symptom is unidentified, the symptom has no identified cause?

 

One in five COVID-19 patients develop mental illness within 90 days - study

https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-mental-illness-int-idUSKBN27P35N

Not exactly stellar or... reliable... methodology:

Especially problematic given that dysautonomia and neurological symptoms are almost systematically labeled as anxiety and/or depression at first. And that diagnoses of anxiety or depression are never confirmed, only presumed, since we have no reliable way to confirm. Generally merely a physician's lazy opinion. It's not as if there were overwhelming reports of Long Covid patients being dismissed with anxiety or something. No, a bunch of people look at this as evidence that there is a lot of anxiety. These people are not very good at... thinking.

Amazing how these people can endlessly point at their own failure as evidence for their ideology. It happened in the past. ME, of course. But the "it" Wessely means is a different it. Turns out accuracy is actually kind of important in science. Who knew!?

 

@rvallee

This just tells me that people in the US who have had Covid-19 are going to be denied healthcare because, of course, being mentally ill is a choice, and they could get better if they wanted to. [sarcasm]

For insurance companies and healthcare companies in the US it must have felt like Christmas every day since the first long haulers came out of the closet - all those people who can be written off even if they've been paying premiums for years.

 

It’s ok to be a jackass as long as your jackassery isn’t harming or killing others.

 

My first comment would be I dont think its safe to assume this is not influenced by observational bias because people who have had help with such problems may be more likely to seek a diagnosis for something like COVID-19. This does not necessarily mean they contract it at a higher rate. That is what needs to be investigated.

My second comment would be that this is not an helpful analysis and it is not safe to assume what is "likely". The question surely is what / how much is due to psychological stress and how much is due to direct affects on the nervous system of the virus and immune response. i.e. there are hypothesese which need testing before making handwavy off the cuff remarks as if you know what you are talking about.

In classical conditioning studies on stress, illness is known to raise the sensitivity of subjects to stressors while according to Dr Paul Cheney neurological damage causes upregulation of neurological sensitivity which may account for hypersensitivity to stimuli in ME. So my first question would be whether this phenomenon of hypersensitivity observed in ME also applies in longcovid and my second would be whether classical conditioning sensitivity due to illness is the same phenomenon seen from a different perspective or a different phenomenon. This is a complex situation which deserves to be studied very carefully.

This is why I think there is some fuzzy handwavey unscientific thinking being incautiously expressed by these psychologists, which is par for the course frankly no matter the prestige of their alma mater. I dont think the ME community will ever forget that McEvedy (the guy who invented hysteria without any research, to explain away school epidemics, to get an easy PhD) was also a psychologist at Oxford, which does not create a happy precedent and the principle of "nullius in verba" (not taking their word for it) most definitely applies.

This avenue of study needs to be held to higher standards of logic and proof.

 

On CNN last night, Chris Como had Dr. Sanjay Gupta on and he mentioned that some long-haulers might develop early onset dementia.

 

Did he have any evidence for that remark, or was he just flapping his lips?

Edit: What am I talking about? Covid has been around for no more than a year, so how could there be any evidence of early-onset dementia?

 

Right. They were discussing mental health/psychiatric issues related to COVID and he mentioned early onset dementia with nothing to back it up.

Since he's a neurosurgeon perhaps he looked at some brain scans to reach that conclusion?

 

Yes, true. But a doctor coming out with such a horrible forecast that could affect hundreds of thousands or millions of people should have said that was what he was basing his comment on.

 

i think because of covids effect on the heart and arteries the possibility of dementia for a small sub group is higher than the general public.

 

I suspect that health services and doctors all over the world, in describing 'long covid' as a 'novel' thing, may be suffering from a collective and wilful dementia themselves.

It's not exactly medicines first encounter with a very, very, similar set of symptoms after a virus - but somehow, each time it happens, it's 'novel' or 'anxiety' or any of a hundred and four other terms which means 'go away'.

Hopefully this time they might not get away with it.

(All numbers are completely made up to illustrate a point in the absence of sufficient fingers)

 

The study was of those who had been diagnosed in the last year, so may well not good control/management of their symptoms:

Importantly, the study, which appeared in the journal World Psychiatry, was designed to reveal correlations, but is not able to judge causality. Nevertheless, Dr. Volkow commented that “the proper control and management of mental disorders is one factor that will [tend to prevent] COVID-19 infection. If you’re delusional or hallucinating, you’re less likely to follow public health interventions. If you’re depressed, you may be unmotivated or you may not care.”

ETA:they then list numerous other reasons, such as housing, poverty etc that will increase their risk of Covid.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1328299364553535488

 

So Mr Vogt already knows that his treatment works for Long Covid. Remarkable clairvoyance.

 

If you dig a little deeper into the 46 survival stories link you can find quotes like this.

Which tells us something.