Poll - Have You Ever Believed In Psychosomatic Illness?

I was never aware of it until I started reading forums where pwM.E/CFS started sharing their experiences.

 

I used to have one of these back in 1994, when I moved out to a house with no carpets in 2013 I cured my asthma. If no body hoovers the floor for a few months my asthma comes back.

See this Reddit post by a doctor: https://www.s4me.info/threads/interesting-reddit-threads.33977/#post-484101

 

Definitely never in the way that it is used by experts.

I never really thought about it. Only heard about it vaguely and mostly never expected that experts could just make stuff up. Now having read from the actual people who did, I can clearly see that they are charlatans with extremely loose ethics, and that simply invalidates everything they say since everything they claim is based on their say-so. It's clearly based on absence of evidence, the god of the gaps, and massively misused by doctors in general as a way of getting patients out of their way, which is highly immoral.

But the conception I had of it was of a trivial thing, extremely far from how it's used. I'm not formally an engineer and I'm not good at math but I was trained as a programmer and mostly worked on the software engineering side of things. The thing I was best at was debugging, and that's basically the raw application of the scientific method and investigative skills. I love physics and value science above all, am basically a universal agnostic. I don't have beliefs. At all. About anything. I'm the rare kind of person who will always change their minds when shown wrong. I certainly don't care one bit about intuitively "knowing" things, that's not how any of this works.

And from a scientific perspective, by definition, this "placebo" thing is the least effective treatment/effect possible since every single approved treatment has to be better than nothing/placebo. Extending this to the "powerful" effect it is believed to be is giant straw-grasping. So I thought it was some legitimate thing, but very minor, very rare, at most .1% as powerful as it's clearly believed by most MDs, who seem to follow Wessely's absurd beliefs that "the placebo is one of the most powerful interventions we have".

Now I know 100% that it's hogwash, fraudulent superstition as made-up as astrology and alchemy. I have zero doubt about it. There is always an explanation and it's beyond clear that it's a mere traditional belief in medicine, one of the most illegitimate things in all the professions. I now think that using it the way it is is criminal, amounts to malfeasance, and will be perceived this way some time in the future.

 

Also, I'm about 99% certain that AI will mark the end of this ideology. It will be brutal in saying that it's complete BS.

The 1% I'm leaving out is the possibility that doctors spend a few years ignoring it, trying to convince AIs that they're actually right, unable to process why such a smart thing could be right about almost everything, and somehow "wrong" about this one thing.

 

I voted other because I'm not sure of the definition. I expect that some people convince themselves that they have a disease and the symptoms from it. Some might convince themselves that they get symptoms from something like 5-G signals ... and reject any experiments that would actually test that. Would those qualify as psychosomatic illness? I certainly don't think it's as common as the medical industry like to think. I think the term is mostly used as an easy way out of a difficult medical problem: can't prove that the diagnosis is wrong, and if the "think yourself better" treatments don't work, it's the patient's fault for not trying hard enough.

 

In my opinion, no.

If we construct this as imaginary illness: everyone seems to agree that psychosomatic illness does not mean imaginary illness.

If we construct it as misattribution: misattributing symptoms to something like wind turbines when they have another simultaneously occurring cause also can't be a psychosomatic illness because the psyche is not generating these symptoms. Being sometimes wrong is normal. So it's just a misattribution. If psychosomatic is used in this instance, for me, it would be an incorrect use of the term.

Those who believe that these are instances of psychosomatic illness seem to believe that the act of believing causes symptoms to appear. But I think that this interpretation is likely confusing "misattribution" with "symptoms being generated by the mind".

But I haven't really had any contact with such patients, so who knows.

 

Your mention of asthma reminds me of something that happened in my school. There was child with asthma there and I remember the teachers discussing an attack they had and they were firmly of the belief it was a psych condition back then.

This same child died when I was in secondary school. It was an asthma attack

I think that was when I realised that they had been wrong and started questioning this attitude.

 

I had asthma attacks as child for a year or so. It started in winter. The attacks were unpredictable and I used an inhaler.

One day we did physical education in a park, on a warm day so it must have been late spring, early summer, or early autumn. Heavy exertion often triggered attacks. That day I was so fed up with it that I just stopped being afraid of an attack and began running and my airways did not constrict in any way. The asthma attacks became less frequent and then stopped alltogether. It sounds like the typical story that believers in psychosomatic illness would tell. To paraphrase one fervent believer: "I looked down the barrel of the asthma gun and disarmed it."

But maybe this interpretation reverses the causality. The asthma was on a trajectory of improvement. It would make sense that one day my mindset would also shift in response to the improvement. And being outdoors is a favorable environment for avoiding asthma attacks.

The inhaler contained cortisone. Around the time of the asthma, I also developed depressive symptoms. I wonder if it was because of the cortisone. I probably used the inhaler too liberally because it was like a miracle to go from feeling choked to breathing freely in seconds.

 

I think the nearest I can get is believing that the experience of some symptoms might be influenced by psychological factors, but that's a very long way from a whole condition being psychosomatic in origin.

Anyway, in a world where we know that parasites can chemically influence their host's behaviour to extreme degrees, how do we demonstrate that symptoms don't have an organic cause?

 

No, just mis-attributed.

That's what medical professionals say, but a lot of them don't really mean it, it's double-speak. There's also different degrees of belief so for example a patient could have 7/10 deteriorative pain, the doctor says they believe the symptoms are real but only believes the patient has non-deteriorative 3/10 pain.

 

Once I understood expectation and similar biases, and what placebo responses in clinical trials actually mean, claims of psychosomatic causation lost a lot of credibility.

It's no coincidence that alleged psychosomatic symptoms/illnesses in many situations resemble various cognitive biases and placebo responses.

For example it has been claimed that suggestibility is a feature of psychosomatic illness (symptoms get worse if patient is told they will get worse). The phenomenon observed here seems to be expectation bias.

The treatments for alleged psychosomatic illnesses are all designed to maximize cognitive biases and placebo responses.

 

Very different thing, it's just wrong attribution, usually as a result of negligence at figuring it out, or genuine ignorance. It's like how infectious diseases used to be blamed on spirits/demons or bad air. The people were ill, not because of demons or spirits, had nothing to do with that.

Which, in a very real sense, is exactly what psychosomatic ideologues do. They take someone who is ill because of a reason, and incorrectly attribute it to some cause that they prefer. It's the exact same thing as when people used to blame disease on superstitious nonsense. And it's not as if before science doctors didn't do that plenty. They very much did. Experience is nearly worthless without a scientific understanding, we are just in the unfortunate last few spots where science hasn't found the real explanation.

 

And it really should never be forgotten just how much of this there is the literature surrounding us. They may say that they don't think we are malingering/feigning, but they sure said it a lot in the past, and in the present, and in writing. It just depends on who the audience is.

It's it's not just the famous "Illness malingering and deception", or whatever, conference that most of the BPS big shots attended, it's still repeated, especially so in the context of disability support and to insurance companies. They can say they never said it, but they did, they absolutely still do argue that about us when they feel comfortable saying so.

And then there's stuff like "The bastards just don't want to get better". There are layers of bigotry and disgusting claims, and they won't be forgotten forever.

 

I started to read the thread not being sure how I would vote.

As I read it, I realised I knew of a case of an illness that to me is entirely psychosomatic and so I ticked yes. Now I wonder why I didn't immediately jump to a 'yes': it is as if I hadn't allowed myself to do this. With my tongue in cheek, I wonder if, as a person with ME, I can't allow myself to enter the domain of the psychs.

I wish I could describe the situation because I would be interested in reading your views but it is current and sensitive so I won't. It does convince me that there are illnesses that are psychosomatic.

After rereading Trish's post #10, I would like to refer to it here.


Maybe you would consider the issue I am referring to a symptom of psychological distress not an illness ( I apologise for it being hard when I am not describing the circumstances), but I would describe ongoing, with no sign of ending after several years, symptoms that affect the functioning of the body and have been fully investigated, an illness, a psychosomatic illness.

 

The problem with that is...there's an obvious mechanism. "True" psychosomatic diseases, like what Chalder and Wessely support, don't have actual causes, it's just

• Anxiety
• ???
• Profit!

We accept that health issues can have physical or mental/emotional causes. But the modern psychosomatic school offers nothing but hand-waving, magical thinking, and statistical fishing expeditions to explain whatever they say is psychosomatic. The real problem with the BPS model is not that it asserts that someone's mental health can affect their physical health or vice/versa, it's that it's all hand-waving nonsense.