Comorbidities of Patients with Functional Somatic Syndromes Before, During and After First Diagnosis, 2020, Donnachie et al

Full title: Comorbidities of Patients with Functional Somatic Syndromes Before, During and After First Diagnosis: A Population-based Study using Bavarian Routine Data

Open access, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66685-4

 

Millions of lives are controlled by "it is thought to". Absurd.

That's quite ridiculous. The patients don't have a choice, they rarely pursue it, are simply told they must or even not given a choice. It's like prescribing placebos and then remarking that the patients frequently take placebos thus confirming a psychosomatic explanation. Come on that's completely circular!

Then maybe stop making stuff up and allow for medical care to build up services and expertise like the patient community has been begging for over decades? And drop the psychosocial nonsense, entirely superfluous.

 

Lots to look at there. But all I'll say for now is that they did not pick up one co-morbidity post-diagnosis --- Medical post-traumatic syndrome.

I guess you just don't find what you're not looking for.

 

The topic of medical gaslighting needs to become very prominent. I think it will in all the upheaval that COVID-19 will cause to the MUS/FND ideology. A new chapter in the book of medicine in its own right, close by to the new chapter on the germ theory of disease and how it's not a binary thing.

It's becoming impossible to ignore that it's very likely that the vast majority of chronic illnesses are caused by pathogens and the immune system's reaction. Which, to be fair, was always the damn obvious explanation. The problem is often presented as many disciplines blindly poking at an elephant and sensing different things. Turns out it germs may actually be the whole elephant in the room. COVID-19 basically has them all wrapped in at once, its presentation is basically a wild buffet of all the discriminated diseases and "medically unexplained" symptoms that medicine loves to hate.

It's a form of systemic injustice and the timing right now could not be any more ripe. As much as we see lots of it in the ME and chronic illness community, I see so much of it even in the "respectable" chronic illnesses, it's definitely not just us. It's rampant throughout all of medicine because of the belief in conversion disorder and poor assessment of evidence.

Freud is about to get his final judgment and it's a plain zero.

 

Since is study is medical record based, much of these findings reflect physician-biased patterns of diagnosis, rather than the symptoms themselves.

The study could have been used to estimate incidence of diagnosis (vs age) and diagnosed prevalence for the primary conditions, but they chose not to...