Sickness behaviour – useful concept or psycho-humbug?

Daisybell said:
It’s very clear to me when one of my animals isn’t well - they go off their food, hunch up, look miserable and take themselves away from the others. So, if humans do much the same, I presume the mechanism is likely to be similar. I don’t think that higher cognitive functions need to come into the equation.
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I agree that it seems to be inherent behaviour in response to symptoms, but I think the picture can be confused in humans who have the higher cognitive functions to enable us to over-ride our inherent need to rest when sick, and instead to push through, potentially preventing full recovery, and misleading observers into thinking we are not as sick as we actually are.

This has certainly been true for me. Far from exhibiting sickness behaviour to elicit sympathy, I have spent years pretending to be less sick than I am, and as a result being judged able to do more than I can actually manage, to my detriment.
 
Woolie said:
Sickness behaviour is a concept that's often referred to in relation to MECFS. I want to see what people think of it. Whether there's something in it, or whether its just a tool used by the mind-over-body crowd.
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It is misused. They can do that because some people and animals learned to fake it and use it to get sympathy.
 
Re: animals - I had a dog once that, after recovery from a leg injury, would fake limping if she wanted to abandon a walk and go home. This behaviour often coincided with foul weather. Once turned for for home the limp would disappear and she would eagerly trot with a spring in her step. Smart, but not that smart.

Some animals, in some circumstances, are able to 'fake' a behaviour for gain. (Though I think in this case it was more like learned communication or language)

I concur with @Trish on pretending to be better than I am, I do it all the time. It's a gloss over what my body is actually doing.

@Mij I don't have the knowledge to understand everything in the info you linked to, but I can see the distinction between 'normal' sickness behaviour and ME - it's pretty clear. Thanks
 
In all honesty, I can /will not take anything written by Morris and Maes with more than a grain of salt or a hodgepodge of lifted ideas thought of first by someone else. My statement is a negative against them and not others who, like so many of us, including myself, have for a very brief moment, thought they’ve ever been legitimate scientists.

Edit to clarify. This is not saying the idea in itself has no merit.
 
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In my, somewhat limited, experience, dogs will "sham" all the time once they determine it leads to a reward, the reward can be extra attention, eliciting behaviour they find desirable, treats etc. - it doesn't matter, once they've discovered that being injured will attract favourable attention they will put it on when it occurs to them.

'orrible sneaky things :p

edit - by all the time I don't mean continously, I mean it becomes another trick in their repertoire.
 
Liv aka Mrs Sowester said:
Hahaha, shocking behaviour from dogs! I'm a cat person @Wonko so I wouldn't know.
Cats conceal illnesses a fair bit in my experience. I have a cat who had an abscess on her foot that made it swell to almost twice the size of the other 3. She walked on it without a limp.
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I am also a cat person, but I have known people who had dogs.

However my cat is "communicative", and likes to let me know the slightest thing that's wrong, not in specific terms you understand, just that she is unhappy, it's then my problem to either figure out what's wrong or where the ear plugs are, she has also been known to sham but isn't actually any good at it lol
 
I was told by a medical professional that I needed to recover quickly so that my developing "sickness behaviours" didn't be come established patterns!

I thought that was a bit rich, but as the individual concerned was other wise helpful (a chiropractor tending to my back) I let it go, and haven't brought the topic up again.
 
I have Mimi, who is a very vocal cat too @Wonko I do end up telling her to stfu most days because she drives me mad with her complaining. Her son, Albert Needles, is obsessed with finding used earplugs and running away with them growling.

I've never known any of my cats to fake illness, I had a cat who used to lose his voice fairly frequently when I was a kid, but that was the only way you could tell he was poorly. Albert Needles gets the sniffles sometimes and he'll find somewhere warm to sleep.
But, apart from my cats that have lived till they're very old and domesticated, they've all concealed illnesses by either carrying on as normal or hiding away somewhere warm and safe, but they've got to be pretty poorly before they get to the hiding away stage.

Isn't concealing illnesses in animals a survival technique? If they show weakness they become vulnerable to predation or losing their territory.
 
Liv aka Mrs Sowester said:
Isn't concealing illnesses in animals a survival technique? If they show weakness they become vulnerable to predation or losing their territory.
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It is supposed to be, I suspect as dogs are a pack animal they have extra social abilities, which include sham'ing - it's really not that sophisticated a behaviour if you think about it, if I do this, then that happens, if I like this then let's do that again - basic training but being done by the dog not the person.

Of course cats, tiny brains, but if an animal is capable of lying (and cats are) and being trained (despite popular opinion cats are), or of training people (which mine definitely is) then sham'ing, not that much of a reach.

Of course when she is genuinely feeling under the weather she will tend to disappear, and not want company, only emerging to snaffle food - when she is sham'ing she will also sometimes disappear, but demand food be brought to her, nice food, no not that, not that either, look it's perfectly simple, bring me something nice, stupid human - over and over again - so on the surface it looks the same behaviour (go hide somewhere quiet), but it's not, especially when coupled with the ability to bound around when, as per usual, I haven't got it right - when she's actually sick she just curls up and ignores me.
 
arewenearlythereyet said:
!!Cat thread Mutating thread alert!!...now where can I find a mod that can correct such an abhorrence (I'm a dog person BTW):D
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Dogs are also mentioned :p

It may not be off topic, may not be, as the discussion moved to sickness behaviour in animals, and both cats and dogs are sometimes considered to be animals, fairly easily observed animals, that this behaviour can be seen in.
 
Just a thought on sickness behaviour in animals. I think a sick or injured animal will still try to run away from a predator if there is nowhere to hide, so perhaps they can override sickness behaviour too. Until they can't and collapse and get eaten.
 
Liv aka Mrs Sowester said:
Could it have been possible that your dog actually had pain in the miserable low pressure weather @Skycloud? The two now healed broken bones I have hurt when the pressure drops.
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I'm sorry you get that recurring pain.

Her injury was to her ligaments, possibly she did have some pain recurring pain(?). But the limp would magically disappear completely as soon as we turned 180 degrees and she knew we were going home. No limp all the way back. It was very striking.

I think it was probably learned behaviour by a smart dog to communicate her opinion to us that she'd rather go home for a snooze. Fair enough :laugh:

Maybe it's not that relevant to the thread.
 
My cats have me pretty well trained too @Wonko, toxoplasmosis would have got me at a very young age. Isn't there a theory that toxoplasmosis infection makes the human host gentler and therefore more receptive to serve the cat's whims?

This has got me thinking about illness and pack behaviour in social animals and how that relates to innate responses to illness in human society.
There is an innate fear and disgust response at many aspects of illness and disability, it's Darwinism. But known and understood illnesses that are not infectious or are easily curable are not feared. Society accepts them and so sympathy for the sufferer overrides the protective fear and disgust response.
Chronic conditions frighten people, illness are expected to either resolve or kill the patient.

We conceal our illness as much as we can because it is unknown and frightening to society. When we can't conceal our illness society tells us to hide it.

The psycho humbug theory of sickness behaviour is, in my view, purely that - psycho humbug. There are no incentives to being permanently ill, temporarily maybe, but permanently no way.
But if sickness behaviour is the cell danger response to a pathogen of some sort, then yes, that makes sense to my mind.
 
barbc said:
In all honesty, I can /will not take anything written by Morris and Maes with more than a grain of salt or a hodgepodge of lifted ideas thought of first by someone else. My statement is a negative against them and not others who, like so many of us, including myself, have for a very brief moment, thought they’ve ever been legitimate scientists.
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There's too much dense information in that paper for me to read it thoroughly and take it in just now but I did skim it. I'm just wondering how high the quality of their evidence is. Anyone fancy looking at the references they use to support their claims?
 
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