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BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

Discussion in 'Psychosomatic news - ME/CFS and Long Covid' started by rvallee, Jul 22, 2020.

  1. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    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.
     
  2. Ariel

    Ariel Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Lou B Lou, Hutan, JemPD and 4 others like this.
  3. Hoopoe

    Hoopoe Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    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.
     
  4. Charles B.

    Charles B. Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    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.
     
    ukxmrv, Snow Leopard, Hutan and 6 others like this.
  5. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    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:

    [​IMG]
     
    JemPD, V.R.T., Holinger and 11 others like this.
  6. Lapis108

    Lapis108 Established Member

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    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.
     
  7. Trish

    Trish Moderator Staff Member

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    I think a lot of us with ME spent time and money in the early years of our disease trying all sorts of nonsense. I certainly did. The problem now is that we have thousands of medics and media people with Long Covid splashing their latest enthusiasms all over Twitter, YouTube etc without realising what harm this can do to their thousands of followers.
     
    livinglighter, RedFox, Leila and 15 others like this.
  8. Sly Saint

    Sly Saint Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    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.
     
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  9. Sean

    Sean Moderator Staff Member

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    'Woo cures all' is a major red flag.
     
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  10. Trish

    Trish Moderator Staff Member

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  11. livinglighter

    livinglighter Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    I'd like to hear such patients describe their experience of ME/CFS in detail.
     
    Last edited: Sep 17, 2022
  12. Art Vandelay

    Art Vandelay Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    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.


     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 13, 2023
  13. SNT Gatchaman

    SNT Gatchaman Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Comments are the usual cesspit.

     
    Lou B Lou, Solstice, EzzieD and 4 others like this.
  14. RedFox

    RedFox Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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

    Andy Committee Member

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    Perhaps it is TikTok, that could explain a lot for all of us ;)
     
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  16. Shadrach Loom

    Shadrach Loom Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    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.
     
    Lou B Lou, Solstice, Sean and 9 others like this.
  17. Wyva

    Wyva Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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

    RedFox Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Considering the alternative, I just might go with Windows.
     
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  19. Trish

    Trish Moderator Staff Member

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    It's quite a clever article in the way it builds its story of what they say is happening in LC with a series of reasonable and scientific sounding steps.

    First, the high prevalence of symptoms like fatigue and pain that doctors can't measure but are 'very real' (patronising) and evidence based in terms of prevalence reported by doctors.

    Then the scientific sounding stuff about the brain working by prediction, and the stuff about functional problems in the brain,

    Then the 'very real' placebo and nocebo effects, especially nocebo which they describe as 'the onset of new, or worsening, symptoms in the wake of negative expectations'.

    Then the pandemic and all the expectations that built about disease and after effects and anxiety etc, and the spread stories about LC in the media and social media building expectations.

    Then of course the logical conclusion is that lots of people will get symptoms their doctor can't measure as a result of this chain from pandemic to expectation to nocebo effect to the brain acting on what is predicted by nocebo effect to functional changes in the brain, and bingo, we have the new version of psychosomatic.

    So this model sounds like it's based on observation, evidence, logic and science - when in fact it's an unevidenced, ie made up, story to suit the prejudices of the psychiatrist et al. who wrote the article.
     
    Lou B Lou, Solstice, Sean and 11 others like this.
  20. Amw66

    Amw66 Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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