The Patient Health Questionnaire-15 (PHQ-15) is widely used to assess somatic symptom burden
This is the opening sentence:
Somatization describes the manifestation of psychological distress through physical symptoms
And this is the opening sentence to a later paragraph:
The Patient Health Questionnaire-15 (PHQ-15;
Kroenke et al., 2002) is the most widely used measure of somatization
It is not a measure. This is not what a measure means, which explicitly requires counting quantities using a linear scale and that those quantities objectively relate to natural phenomena or forces. Instead it's a scoring system built on qualitative answers to qualitative questions and interpreted with heaps of subjective biases. It's as much a measure as a horoscope is.
When you look at the PHQ-15, all it does is ask about common symptoms. The idea that this translates into a measure of somatization belongs in the same bin as astrology being validated by the (true) fact that the Sun does influence all life on Earth.
So, clearly what's in the box is not what the packaging describes. It's not used to assess "somatic symptom burden", it's meant to frame symptoms as psychosomatic, which is not just of absolutely no use, but is frankly perfidious. The idea that asking about symptoms validates the conversion disorder is one of the most ridiculous ideas in our modern age, right there with hidden wireless speakers validating the existence of ghosts. It's really hard to understand how something so obviously harmful and ridiculous could have gotten so much influence.
Sack the lot of them and nobody would notice.
Well, we would. It would be very noticeable to us. We are the only people who would actually notice a difference. Alas, we are not people to rituals like this. But it is one of the rare things in medicine where if it simply disappeared, everything and everyone would be better for it. This is rare and stunning.
Look at how much of a joke this is:
Trouble sleeping (14.2%) and feeling tired (14.0%) were the most frequently endorsed symptoms in the “bothered a lot” category, followed by pain in the arms, legs, or joints (10.8%) and back pain (9.2%). These findings suggest that sleep disturbance, fatigue, and musculoskeletal complaints were the most prominent issues in this sample.
Yes, the two most common symptoms in all of medicine are common and will, in fact, be the most common symptoms in most samples. How is this remarkable when it's exactly what is expected? This validates exactly nothing, and is in fact totally circular because knowledge about which symptoms are most common are based entirely on questionnaires like this one.
Notably, this study advances the literature by examining PHQ-15 factor structures within a large, diverse sample during a period of heightened psychosocial stress, namely the COVID-19 pandemic
And yet it found exactly what is expected based on prior data, showing how all of this noise about "a period of heightened psychosocial stress" is nothing but noisy mumbo jumbo.
However, without comparative pre-pandemic data, no causal conclusions can be drawn about the specific impact of COVID-19 on symptom presentation.
I have no idea where the notion that no comparative data using the PHQ-15 exists from before the pandemic when it was developed decades ago and is widely used, something they actually boast about as a good thing. What is this nonsense?
Loneliness was associated with somatic symptoms to a lesser extent, while health service use showed the weakest associations. This suggests that somatic complaints are closely tied to internal psychological states but do not always translate into help-seeking.
Health care professionals have seriously weird ideas and beliefs about illness and why people seek health care. They seem unable to understand that being ill almost always leads to social isolation, yet they argue the relationship entirely backwards, and don't understand that the fact that there is no available health care for people who suffer from symptoms means there is not much reason to seek it, even though it's been the main goal of psychosomatic ideology. Once people get the very loud and obnoxious message that there is no help available to them, they stop trying. Which is exactly as expected.
For instance, the fatigue domain showed the strongest association with depressive symptoms, but this should be interpreted cautiously because the PHQ-9 includes sleep disturbance and low energy items that overlap with the PHQ-15 fatigue items, which likely inflates this correlation.
Yeah, no shit.
For sure this is the least useful discipline in the entire professional world, and by a very large margin.
