BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

Honestly, I think the concern here is a bit unwarranted. The downside of being a discriminated patient community is that no one cares what we say, or even happens to us. The upside, when stuff like that happens, is the same. No one cares about this stuff and it's already roughly the current paradigm it's not as if this will change anything. The same nonsense will be repeated by the same people with the same frequency and derpitude anyway.

 

Gez M has been causing this kind of trouble since I first became aware of him. I am sure he is familiar with the issues, as he has faced rounds of criticism before, along with Asad Khan for sharing the content. (I unfollowed him as did others). Here is a thread from July 2021 in which they both respond to criticism and questions about motivations:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1419085023878082567


https://twitter.com/user/status/1419560206619615240


I am troubled that this is continuing.

 

I came to a similar conclusion, which was: the illness he is experiencing or went through may have been a time where he felt awful and hopeless, a time for reflection and reevaluating his life, and also remembering other events from the past that were similar. I suspect he does not have a good grasp of statistics and reasoning about causes of illness, and like many people wants to make sense of what happened to him, and so jumped to the conclusion that there was some causal connection between past events and long covid.

And maybe there is also this element of being scared that long covid could return ro get worse again, and so the idea of controlling long covid by working on old trauma could seem appealing.

 

I should have proffered a more cogent response initially. I didn’t mean that Gez would spur a revolution in interest from outside, unaffiliated parties. I meant that his endorsement of the trauma narrative would drum up the same antiquated tropes from the usual suspects, and indeed it has.

However, I do think that in itself is damaging from a patient welfare standpoint. It’s exhausting to revisit these apocryphal theories, and Gez merely exacerbated said exhaustion.

 

I think this thread can be retired, there's no point adding anything to it, almost everything Long Covid falls under this. I actually expected medicine to get to work and that this BPS nonsense would be a sideshow that would be mostly laughed at as clownish.

Instead this is the norm, almost everything has fallen under this model. I'm not sure why I expected this, it just seems like the bare minimum, doing anything less just seemed morally and professionally unacceptable. And yet here we are.

This is what medicine is, fundamentally. It wasn't just the product of ideologues who fail at science, it's in the culture, as a tradition. It's not a fringe thing happening in the shadows while others are busy elsewhere. It's just how medicine deals with things they can't work out easily.

To sum up:

 

Although Gez has been an excellent source of information for those with Long Covid. He is definitely beginning to dabble with the dark side. If you watch the videos there's a 'eureka' sense when the type a personality is described and a bit too much glow of the converted.
He's well and truly fallen down the rabbit hole of the parasympathetic/sympathetic nervous system upstream interventions. The Gupta video was bad enough but the type A and polyvagal stuff is just claptrap. Yet whatever is said to him he stands by it all ‍♀️. He really needs to do his research more - he did start tweeting it was software not hardware issues with no realisation that is how FND is described. Him and Asad Khan are buddies and it's a real shame to see Dr Khan standing up for this harmful point of view when he seems to be so against the BPS, FND etc.

 

I was watching an interview of someone who 'healed herself' after a major trauma (sexual assault) and eventually diagnosed with ME/CFS which she says she had for 13 years, and having tried everything spoke to someone who told her all about the mind-body stuff. She then did loads of courses and has been a life coach, mind-body therapist for a few years.

I've been digging around a bit and John Sarno (inventor of 'TMS' tension myositis syndrome seems to come up quite a lot in other similar talks/interviews).

quick googling brings up quite a lot of skeptical commentary about his theories but equally, even quite recently, there are those who are convinced of their validity and applying them not just to pain but healing of just about anything.

 

I'd like to hear such patients describe their experience of ME/CFS in detail.

 

Merged thread

Long COVID highlights why we need to overhaul the term ‘psychosomatic’

This is a rather embarrassing article (for the authors) in Canada's the Globe and Mail. They repeat all the usual pseudo-scientific tropes about hardware vs software and buy into the myth of the placebo and nocebo effects.

 

Comments are the usual cesspit.

 

If there's software in my head, I hope it's not from Microsoft.

 

Perhaps it is TikTok, that could explain a lot for all of us

 

Oh god, imagine if the “brain retraining” evangelists lean into the software analogy and start borrowing buzzwords from tech. They’ll be wittering about agile, iterative cognitive design, and neural dev ops for hot-deploying health affirmations, probably attracting stacks of venture capital along the way.

 

Mine is I think, I get the blue screen of death a lot.

 

Considering the alternative, I just might go with Windows.

 

Moved from Has the arrival of Long Covid strengthened or weakened the influence of psychosomatic medicine? Discussion thread