I'm a very weird person and all, and I generally adopt the idea that textbooks, especially at the grad school level, should definitely be accurate, but clearly the authors of this book don't mind.
Delivering and explaining a positive diagnosis of MUS/FND is the stepping stone towards a successful management plan that may include guided self-help, CBT and input by several other members of a multidisciplinary team (e.g. physiotherapy or speech and language therapy, depending on the nature of the FND symptoms). Recovery depends on positive patient engagement with the process.
There is literally nothing supporting this. In fact all the evidence proves to be the opposite. This could be written, mostly unchanged other than a few words, about any cult, pseudoscience or alternative medicine, as well as most superstitious beliefs. When what you sell is a scam, you need suckers, and suckers need to engage with the process, or it doesn't pay off.
Dear god. We are in worse position than 20 years ago. The UK medical establishment rolls on crushing ME patients to oblivion.
Generally speaking, despite Long Covid having put the whole blurry picture into sharp focus, I'm afraid you are correct. And not just in the UK. Things would obviously have worsened anyway, biopsychosocial ideology guarantees it, but that it's happening despite LC unfolding in the context of a global pandemic is really a disturbing indictment of just how much truth is a social construct, and facts matter very little. Even to academics and professionals, it turns out.
About the only facts that actually matters is whether people can make or save money out of them. Everything else is irrelevant, vibes and culture overwhelm everything. Once it's possible to make money out of treating us, people will throw themselves at it, but until then, it's off to the trash chute.
One day the ME patients will be outnumbered by the exploiters of our illness, grifters never give up. They gain so much off our backs.
Actually, it's even worse than that: they actually gain very little from it. Most of the people involved would find nothing different in any aspect of their daily lives if they never got involved in this. There are a few grifters, but they'd simply use different labels for the same thing. People are absurdly cheap, willing and able to throw millions of people in the trash for maybe about the equivalent of a new refrigerator every year in net gain, and generally not even that.
The total losses are several trillions in the last century, and even the main beneficiaries, the insurance industry and government welfare agencies, have all lost far more than they would have gained if they had taken this seriously and solved it.
It's not stupidity that is infinite about humans, it's absurdity. We are an absurd species. As one final bit of absurdity in this, is the popular meme among the ideologues that "MUS" isn't medical, psychiatric or psychological, it's between all of them, or something like it. But here it finds itself in psychiatry, for absolutely no reason. Commitment to absurdity, I guess.
