ME/CFS SKeptic: A new blog series on the dark history of psychosomatic medicine

Asthma and allergies can kill.

When is this madness going to stop?

When are these people who insist on playing fast and loose with other people's health and their very lives going to be held accountable?

 

Very, very interesting article on asthma, thank you.

Of particular interest to me, because my husband is asthmatic and struggled for years to get proper treatment. Nobody denied he had asthma (that I'm aware of), they just wouldn't treat him with the standard treatment. He eventually got treatment that worked in the latter half of the 1980s.

We were walking somewhere and the route we took included a very gentle incline. He ran out of air and we had to turn back. He went to a doctor for the umpteenth time, and this time he had his lung capacity measured. For a man of his age, height and build he had only a third of the lung capacity he should have. Finally, for the first time ever, he was prescribed the standard inhalers and they worked. Six weeks after starting treatment his lung capacity was normal.

...
I am baffled by the picture just before the words in bold...

Why is Asthma no longer seen as psychosomatic?

What is that a picture of? To me it looks like a bit of a chicken's foot (???) in the middle of something unidentifiable. Can someone interpret it for me and tell me the significance, please.

 

Thanks for the explanation. But my brain is still interpreting what I see as something incorporating a chicken's foot.

 

Many people with MS are on antidepressants, or at least they were before MS drugs became available. I think they were handed out the way they are to women with ME. There is not so much reactive depression as with ME because it is acknowledged as bad and there is not the same struggle to get benefits or aids. Family accept it though there is a depressing minority of cases where the father hops it and leaves the mother with young kids to deal with as well as the illness.

Some people become depressed about their situation and there must be some who develop depression as a result of neurological damage. In 25 years of attending an MS centre I only ever met one man with frank dementia as a result of MS and, strangely, only one woman who had a period of blindness despite that being seen as a common consequence of MS.

One of the things people with MS are told is that people in a wheelchair are not necessarily sicker than people who can still walk it just depends on which nerves are affected.

 

Years ago now, I watched a TV program fronted by Dr Miriam Stoppard because I knew she would be talking about ME. It was horrendous, completely BPS in orientation. There was an invited audience as well as "experts" saying that ME was purely psychological. She also had people with asthma there. One girl spoke about how bad her asthma had been throughout her childhood. Then she was asked how she was now and she said that since she went to university she no longer needed asthma so she had got better.

 

Presumably blithely ignoring the fact that
a) some people grow out of it in their teens

b) the chances are when she went to uni she also moved away from home and thus lived in a completely different environment.

 

New blog post: the dark psychosomatic history of epilepsy.
https://mecfsskeptic.com/the-dark-psychosomatic-history-of-epilepsy/

https://twitter.com/user/status/1379451257870553091

 

Very interesting article.

Blame the mother - it makes life so much easier for the medical profession and society in general.

 

too unwell to read - hope they cover the fake death threats used to withhold key information from advocates and to prejudice researchers against patients https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Intimidation_and_bullying_of_PACE_trial_critics

 

These blogs are really, really good. Having all these dreadful ideas in one place is a wonderful resource to use when people are talking about FND and MUS and all the other letters used as euphemisms for neurotic and hysterical.

For myself, I particularly like the way the horrendous descriptions of diseases being the failure and moral weakness of the patients are given with complete confidence and so called definitive evidence to back them up. It makes me feel better when I read the "scientific" basis of FND.

 

Perhaps the moral weakness is within those who invented promulgate labels such as FND and MUS.

 

New article on psychosomatic theories on diabetes

https://twitter.com/user/status/1382328193558929419


This blog post looks at psychosomatic theories of diabetes, from Walter Cannon’s concept of ‘emotional glycosuria’ to the myth of the diabetic personality. We will discuss the problems with the term ‘brittle diabetes’ and the importance of differentiating type 1 and type 2. We also discuss the problematic statements on diabetes by Helen Flanders Dunbar, one of the foremost proponents of psychosomatic medicine. Dunbar stated that “the diabetic partner often wants to be babied more than is usually compatible with mutual happiness” and that diabetic patients persuade doctors “to play mother to their childishness.”

....

Full text at: The dark psychosomatic history of diabetes - ME/CFS Skeptic

 

Yes, its documented that many diabetics were thrown in insane asylums because there is nothing wrong with them. I may read this and comment further, because the timing of these issues is important, and the incarceration of diabetics was late nineteenth century to early twentieth century if I recall correctly. However the psychogenic bandwagon really didn't take off till just after early twentieth century, and was in full swing in the 30's. Of course it was the new best thing, with thousands of papers on cancer as a mental disorder, and I think a little later on, heart disease as a mental disorder. The history of these claims where we have scientific explanations is a universal fail. They persist where there is insufficient science, sometimes because new technologies are needed to measure things, like with diabetes and MS.

 

As usual the same terms used by different doctors can mean different things.

With regards to brittle diabetes, my own endocrinologist used the term to help me understand what was happening with a teenage family member whose diabetes was poorly controlled through no fault of their own.

His explanation was that as she was developing as a teen and experiencing hormone fluctuations that had a knock on effect on her type 1 diabetes. So there would be times when her blood sugar levels would be off despite good management. It just meant that we still had to manage it as best we could and support her through a difficult few years.

Same term. Very different interpretation.

 

From the blog by ME/CFS Skeptic:

"We can’t help but wonder what would have happened if biomedical understanding of diabetes hadn’t been so successful in providing an alternative narrative. Perhaps these psychoanalytic speculations might have become more popular and harmful, as they were in the case of asthma, epilepsy, or autism."

"As often, the quest for a psychosomatic understanding of illness resulted in stigma and blaming the patient for being ill."

"Many type 2 patients are not obese and there are other important risk factors such as genetics. "

My understanding is that there are many skinny type 2 diabetics, especially in Asian countries, but that while thin they still had high levels of visceral fat. Conversely, there are obese people with little visceral fat, and this seems to be protective. I am not aware of quality large scale research into these issues but I have not been looking much. Also there is the historical claim, which I have not investigated, that high carb diets in Asia were common without diabetes, but that the introduction of sugar into the national diet, such as in China, led to up to a tenfold increase in type 2 diabetes. They were already eating a lot of glucose, it was fructose that was new in large quantities in the diet.

About twenty something years ago I told a senior doctor at a major hospital, not in Australia either, that there are many skinny type 2 diabetics. He did not believe me, just as a medical student didn't a few years later. The senior doctor went to his very large endocrinology ward, and guess what he found?

 

None of the comments I've made in this post relate to type 1 diabetes, I am only referring to type 2 diabetes. I just wanted to make that clear...

This was a very interesting article, thank you. I wasn't aware of diabetes being considered to be psychosomatic in the past. Nowadays people with type 2 diabetes are blamed for their condition because they are assumed to be lazy and greedy with no self-control, so the psychological and psychosomatic aspects of the condition are still being pushed, but from a different perspective from days of yore.

Also, diabetics have been told for years that their condition is progressive and will inevitably get worse. The fact that people can reduce the severity of their condition, and avoid it getting progressively worse by reducing their carb intake has been gradually becoming more commonly known, but progress seems to be slow. If people reduce their carb intake they must increase their fat and protein intake to compensate, and many people's heads just explode when they are told this (and I'm including doctors in that statement). What about cholesterol?!?!?

That made my jaw drop. So my understanding of this sentence... If you give an animal physical brain damage there are physical effects in/on the body, and this provides evidence of mental illness in humans.

A classic example of "When the only thing you have is a hammer, you see everything as a nail". It would appear that Dunbar was a one-trick pony. (Which reminds me of someone with the initials MS.)

The year when this started becoming apparent (1980) is important because certain very important changes were made to dietary guidelines in the USA in 1977.

Following quote is from https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/about-dietary-guidelines/history-dietary-guidelines

Many people think that the reason everyone got fat is because people didn't follow the guidelines, but there is data that shows people did follow the guidelines and the proportions of fat, protein and carbohydrate eaten in the US did change over the years to give a greater emphasis on carbs in the US diet. And since a diet low in protein and fat is unsatisfying to many, people eat more carbs because they feel hungry and then berate themselves for their lack of will power.

And manufacturers found that in order to make their foods palatable when they lowered protein and fat, they had to add sugar (or one of its many forms). Since sugar has an addictive effect (not present, as far as I'm aware, with protein and fat) Big Food found out that they could sell more products by adding sugar. I remember finding out from an American friend that milk has sugar added in the US. I was shocked! At least ordinary milk in the UK just contains milk without any additions.

 

Thanks, just one clarification: the psychosomatic theories of diabetes were rather marginal and noninfluential as far as we can tell.

We provide an overview of psychosomatic explanations and go look for them, because that's what our series of articles focuses on, but this doesn't always mean that the illness was viewed as much by doctors and researchers. In the 19th century, there was some speculation that diabetes might be a 'nervous disease' but that seems to have meant a neurological disease that could be influenced by psychosocial factors.

The main idea of the blog is more that even in an obvious biomedical disease such as diabetes, there were all sorts of psychosomatic theories and speculations. If biological understanding didn't progress as it did and provide an alternative viewpoint with a successful treatment, than perhaps these might have produced popular myths and preconceptions as in the case of asthma, epilepsy, autism etc.

 

As a comment that I have seen many times, advances in medical science typically follow advances in technology, both diagnostic and treatment technology. Prior to such advances thinking is sometimes magical. From evil spirits, wandering wombs, demonic possession, curses by witches, foul miasma, bad humours, to more recent thoughts of conversion disorder and other psychogenic explanations, of which there are now many. People fight them and fight them, and they redefine terms and go back to unprovable and unproven assertions. Its no surprise that they change terms and definitions every few years. Then a new technology comes along and in a few years one more disease is struck from their roster.

For ME the implication is clear, we need to back our genuine biomedical researchers.

To my way of thinking, psychogenic claims, with the evidence base we have now, is most likely institutionalized dogmatic quackery. If they want to prove otherwise they had better do some genuine science, and succeed.

 

The case of type 2 diabetes holds a warning for ME. The explicit talk of mother fixation or an anal personality is unlikely to get very far today but blame lifestyle or moral choice and it is accepted without challenge.

I am not feeling well enough today to track down the details but there was a large study done in Europe with thousands of participants where they found that the lean offspring of type 2 diabetics processed fat in a different way from controls.

The usual claim that lifestyle choices are the cause of type2 diabetes is true as far as they go but like the BPS statements they are not heard the way the truth lies.

We live in a time where the majority of people eat an unhealthy diet and do not live energetic lives - a lifestyle which is encouraged by manufacturers and employers who both profit from it. People who do not have a diabetic genome will not develop diabetes but those who do will become ill. There are also clues that having a diabetic genome contributes to becoming obese.

So diabetics will do better on a healthier lifestyle but only because they cannot get away with it, yet the implication is that diabetics have a worse diet and lifestyle than people who are not.

I keep seeing things which talk about people being cured of their diabetes by diet or an operation but that is the same sort of "recovery" we see in ME. Being cured of diabetes means eating sugar loaded food all day yet your blood sugar levels remaining stable. being recovered from ME means being able to run a marathon with no problems.

There are also assumptions made that your lifestyle must be bad if you are diabetic or have ME and that your diet must be awful if your are overweight or obese, so they claim that we are deconditioned without ever testing the assumption and prescribe amitriptyline and gabapentin for pain despite them leading to weight gain.

Everything is complicated by the fact that there is very little research being done into the causes of diabetes. The profit is in treating the disease not in finding a cure. Putting the blame on patients is a good way of doing this while acting as if your motives are beyond reproach and we see that everyday. If you are not cured in 6 weeks of CBT then you do not want to get better.