Is Cognitive Change Necessary to Alleviate Symptoms in Patients With Functional Somatic Syndrome?, 2021, Maroti and Johansson

[rvallee]

This is the problem. The brain is a black box and we are still making guesses. Advances in medicine occur with advances in technology. I don't think we yet have the technology to get this right.

Clearest historical example of this. Some people saw a face in the first picture, where they wanted to see a face. Psychiatry sees thoughts and beliefs using technology that is probably far cruder by comparison. Especially as those beliefs started before electricity, when we could see nothing at all. They made stuff up not just out of shadows, not out of blurry low-resolution images, but out of a complete void of insight: their own intuition.

(This is a picture of Mars from orbit, focused on a small hill)

 

[Sean]

Psychiatry is all too often just psychiatrists looking into a mirror to do a Rorschach test on themselves, and thinking that explains the patient's psyche.