Intelligence is negatively associated with the number of functional somatic symptoms, 2009, Kingma et al

Grigor

Grigor

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I just stumbled on a conversation on LinkedIn with professor in psychosomatic medicine Judith Rosmalen where she states that MUS is more common in people with low intelligence. (see screenshot)

https://bit.ly/38611iK

She apparently studied the subject and I would love to know what you guys think about the study!



Thank you!
 

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Personally I think belief in psychogenic causation of illness is a sign of low intelligence. One need only read the stuff these people publish. It's full of flawed reasoning, contradictions and errors. You've got to be pretty dumb to believe in this stuff, or else you would notice all these problems.

There is such a big problem with the assumption that unexplained means psychogenic and these people apparently think it's perfectly logical and good reasoning.
 
*Snorts derisively*

In summary -
We have decided to judge these people for absolutely no reason other than the fact that society lets us. Now we're getting away with treating them like second class citizens let's add insult to injury. Literally.

That or it's a bet. Just how much stupidity can we as research display, how much casual cruelty can we inflict before someone puts a stop to it.
 
It's plausible that there is a genuine correlation of this kind (eg. being unable to function also means having fewer and worse opportunities to develop one's intelligence, or certain illnesses like POTS could cause brain fog which could affect performance in intelligence tests that were designed to be used in healthy populations).

Such a correlation could be interpreted in many different ways. Usually the psychogenic theorists are only interested in interpretations that justify the belief that unexplained symptoms aren't a failure by the doctor to diagnose the disease but a failure of the patient.

Research into presumed psychogenic conditions has big problems with failure to exclude reverse causality.
 
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If I'm seeing right, the cognitive tests are done in the patient population, not from pre-illness tests. So basically they find that people with chronic illness who complain of significant cognitive symptoms show less intelligence than healthy people who have no significant cognitive symptoms.

So this is actually a confirmation of significant impairment, twisted around to insult a population of tens of millions as being stupid. It is self-evident that people who complaint of cognitive impairment will be cognitively impaired in relevant evaluations, as long as the evaluations are smarter than "is this a giraffe?". And yet this impairment is rejected, which creates an awkward situation, resolved by simply assuming we must have always been stupid and saying it out loud, adding insult to insult to injury.

I will leave the intellectual exercise of decoding the following acronyms to the author: GFY. And another one for good measure: GTFOH.

As echoed in other comments, belief in conversion disorder is itself a sure sign of foolishness. Intelligence without wisdom is just as incompetent as far below average intelligence, finding brand new smart ways to be dumb.
 
strategist said:
It's plausible that there is a genuine correlation of this kind (eg. being unable to function also means having fewer and worse opportunities to develop one's intelligence, or certain illnesses like POTS could cause brain fog which could affect performance in intelligence tests that were designed to be used in healthy populations).
Click to expand...

True. If someone developed a condition like POTS prior to having the chance to develop one's intelligence or prove that level via career achievements.

How does one then explain the doctors, engineers, scientists and lawyers who develop these same conditions?
 
The print is too small for me to read, so I've copied the abstract here:

Intelligence is negatively associated with the number
of functional somatic symptoms
E M Kingma, L M Tak, M Huisman, J G M Rosmalen

ABSTRACT

Background: Functional somatic symptoms (FSS), that
is, symptoms that cannot be conclusively explained by
organic pathology, have a poorly understood aetiology.
Intelligence was studied as a risk factor for FSS. It was
hypothesised that intelligence is negatively associated
with the number of FSS. To investigate the specific role of
intelligence in FSS as opposed to medically explained
symptoms (MES), the association of intelligence with FSS
was compared with that of intelligence with MES. It was
also hypothesised that lifestyle factors and socioeconomic
factors mediate the relationship between intelligence and
both FSS and MES, whereas psychological distress is
especially important for FSS.

Methods: All analyses were performed in a longitudinal
study with two measurement waves in a general
population cohort of 947 participants (age 33–79 years,
47.9% male). The Generalized Aptitude-Test Battery was
used to derive an index for general intelligence, and the
somatisation section of the Composite International
Diagnostic Interview was used to measure the number of
FSS and MES.

Results: General intelligence was significantly associated
with the number of FSS. The association of intelligence
and FSS but not MES was mediated by work situation:
participants of lower intelligence who reported more FSS
were more often (unwanted) economically inactive. No
evidence was found for a mediating role of psychological
distress in the association of intelligence with FSS, even
though distress was an important predictor of FSS.

Conclusion: Intelligence is negatively associated with
the number of FSS in the general population. Part of the
association of intelligence with FSS is explained by a more
unfavourable work situation for adults of lower intelli-
gence.
 
The psychogenic theorists seem to lack the intelligence to understand that the constant publications of articles that are biased towards finding negative psychological or behavioural traits in certain patient groups causes profound harm. The combined effect of thousands of papers like this being published every year is that of an intense propaganda campaign against a vulnerable group. As thought experiment, ask yourself if racist message campaigns against ethnic minorities at such a scale were socially acceptable. Clearly not.

Things don't have to be this way. They could also choose to respect patients. Doctors and patients could get along without conflict.
 
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strategist said:
Personally I think belief in psychogenic causation of illness is a sign of low intelligence. One need only read the stuff these people publish. It's full of flawed reasoning, contradictions and errors. You've got to be pretty dumb to believe in this stuff, or else you would notice all these problems.
Click to expand...

Yes but isn't this an association? It could be reading of this stuff constantly is the cause of the low intelligence rather than the other way around? it's hard to tell what a continual diet of this research could do to a healthy mind.
 
dave30th said:
Yes but isn't this an association? It could be reading of this stuff constantly is the cause of the low intelligence rather than the other way around? it's hard to tell what a continual diet of this research could do to a healthy mind.
Click to expand...

I also have the suspicion there is a dynamic where teachers tell their students a lot of made up bullshit about the wonders of psychosomatic illness. The students then grow into academics themselves and find that fraud is rampant, and to have a career, they have to make up bullshit about psychosomatic illness. They then teach this to the next generation. And so the cycles continues since the times of Freud.

In a sense these academics are also victims of this ideology. They're expected to deliver results which is impossible because psychosomatic medicine is bullshit and does not work, and so they either quit or make stuff up.

Making stuff up in psychosomatic medicine has become so normal that outcome switching, intentionally avoiding controlling for placebo effects and so is not considered a cause of concern.
 
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The association of intelligence with FSS was mediated by the work situation of participants, suggesting that adult men and women of lower intelligence who report more functional somatic
symptoms are more often (unwanted) economically inactive.
In contrast to our expectations, no evidence was found for a
mediating role of psychological distress in the association of
intelligence with FSS, even though distress was an important
predictor of FSS.
Click to expand...

This seems to be a key point but I'm a little puzzled by what they are trying to say.
 
There's this old thread on a 2013 paper from Rosmalen, White, etc: https://forums.phoenixrising.me/thr...ldhood-cognitive-ability-and-somatic-s.26753/

They thought less bright children would be more likely to end up with CFS, and found:

We found an association between higher cognitive ability and self-reported CFS/ME, which was in contrast to our hypothesis. Since the association was only found when additionally adjusting for psychological symptoms and since it was rather small, we might consider this as a chance finding.
Click to expand...

I wonder if they'd consider a similarly sized finding to be just chance if it had supported their hypothesis? I'm not sure I remember having ever read a paper where a significant finding in support of the researchers hypothesis was suggested to be a matter of chance.
 
I believe, though without concrete data, that my own intelligence is inversely related to the number of symptoms associated with my ME.

Having two psychology degrees, a further clinical qualification and some twenty years experience working with people with neurological conditions I could argue I have some standing in making a profession judgement on this issue.

At the onset of my ME I carried a regional clinical specialism and successfully managed a team of six clinicians. My department also had a research output that a comparably sized University department would not have been ashamed of. Simultaneously I was training to be yoga teacher. Over the nearly thirty years of my ME, I went from having mild CFS/ME to being largely bed-bound. As my condition has deteriorated I have acquired additional symptoms, including food intolerances, IBS, orthostatic intolerance, chostochondritis and more. At the same time I have gone from being able to sustain an intellectually demanding job, including participation in regional and national policy forums, regularly reading five or six books a week, both fact and fiction, managing staff undertaking research projects and undertaking higher degrees, to being unable to work, to having not been able to read an entire book in five years and requiring assistance to set up an on line grocery account and manage my daily life.

So I accept it is a definite possibility that ‘intelligence is negatively associated with the number of [so called] functional somatic symptoms’. My personal experience would support that. However this association in my case would much more rationally be explained by having an ongoing condition involving neurological factors that caused both the ‘somatic’ symptoms and the intellectual deterioration. Such an association between intelligence and the number of symptoms could be seen as strong evidence against the condition being functional, somatic or psychosomatic, rather support for the conclusion that Prof Rosmalen and the cited study profoundly misunderstanding their clinical grouping.
 
Peter Trewhitt said:
I believe, though without concrete data, that my own intelligence is inversely related to the number of symptoms associated with my ME.

Having two psychology degrees, a further clinical qualification and some twenty years experience working with people with neurological conditions I could argue I have some standing in making a profession judgement on this issue.

At the onset of my ME I carried a regional clinical specialism and successfully managed a team of six clinicians. My department also had a research output that a comparably sized University department would not have been ashamed of. Simultaneously I was training to be yoga teacher. Over the nearly thirty years of my ME, I went from having mild CFS/ME to being largely bed-bound. As my condition has deteriorated I have acquired additional symptoms, including food intolerances, IBS, orthostatic intolerance, chostochondritis and more. At the same time I have gone from being able to sustain an intellectually demanding job, including participation in regional and national policy forums, regularly reading five or six books a week, both fact and fiction, managing staff undertaking research projects and undertaking higher degrees, to being unable to work, to having not been able to read an entire book in five years and requiring assistance to set up an on line grocery account and manage my daily life.

So I accept it is a definite possibility that ‘intelligence is negatively associated with the number of [so called] functional somatic symptoms’. My personal experience would support that. However this association in my case would much more rationally be explained by having an ongoing condition involving neurological factors that caused both the ‘somatic’ symptoms and the intellectual deterioration. Such an association between intelligence and the number of symptoms could be seen as strong evidence against the condition being functional, somatic or psychosomatic, rather support for the conclusion that Prof Rosmalen and the cited study profoundly misunderstanding their clinical grouping.
Click to expand...

Very interesting.

They did mention this in the study:

Although general intelligence
is regarded as a trait that is stable from infancy into middle
age,44 it cannot be excluded that reverse causality, in which
somatic symptoms contribute to lower intelligence scores, is
playing a role.
Click to expand...
 
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