Talking therapies linked with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease

It seems psychologists are always looking to expand into other markets, no matter how unlikely and implausible:

 

Good. Carry on picking fights with cardiologists. There are lots of them, some of whom are quite eminent, and they are all basically either plumbers or electricians, who couldn’t give a stuff what happens in patients’ heads.

 

I wish, these things seem to get pushed in through the GP pathways with claims of 'the never never' being reduced. Based on the fact that people who were less ill and had a working situation where they were more able to attend regular sessions of anything - it could have been balloon animals (and probably would have been more fun) - turned out to over big averaged numbers be less likely to be those who got heart disease. VS those who perhaps couldn't as they were holding down 3 jobs in a poor area with no buses and no decent shops near them maybe being the underlying real causal behind such associations.

A filter just like getting their chronic fatigue-heavy cohort to do a Krypton factor test as treamtnet, to filter out those with PEM/ME/CFS into drop-outs then claiming a wow on the increased average. Maybe I'm just being cynical but I doubt it.

I've come to learn (as someone with a psychology degree) that the rejig of mental health is so bad that, to me, most of these docs at GP level are being taught that is somone has anything that 'could be mental' - and yes they actually mean like slow brain just as someone who had bladder cancer 6months later at work did (I of course noticed because I could relate to looking at them talking and knowing that probably others, not me, thought they might seem drunk or something as the exhaustion affected their speech at that 6th working day of the week as it did mine) 'isn't for them to work out'. Frightened into it with 'duty of care' warnings too. So things that might be more associated with stroke, alzheimers cogntively now are all send to the same place. Which means 'anything thought' is now mental health. Which still puzzles the life out of me.

SO it isn't just an issue of the dualism double-cross in the nonsense FND literature but in so many other medical things being actively dumped into inappropriate buckets instead of things that 20yrs ago would have been understood as cognitive fatigue and a potential 'other/early symptom' of other medical illnesses to be looked into because 'being unwell' does that to ones system. And once sent there 'to be diagnosed' they are met with people who aren't allowed to anymore quite often so receive a diagnosis that was inappropriate. They certainly do not have the medical training to triage them back for physical illnesses.

Kidding people that because of whatever tricks have been pulled here 'it's OK because it will help heart disease' is just another excuse for the cognitive dissonance of that trick. Which to me translates as fear of ever being near someone with mental health, actual mental health, and not having referred them to IAPT (generic programme not a lot of use for anything serious) because they've been told these people will be 'time sucks'. But the pathwaying is partly responsible for that, because they can't just use their nouse and test for what might be e.g. ulcer the most obvious and often instead have to go through the decision tree where they send them away to see if it gets better in 2 weeks and so on.

That's where I think this is aimed. And I think there is a real issue. At the gatekeeping edge. With sales pitches claiming the frontier of medicine is 'prevention' and 'wellness' is what does that but they seem to be poor catch phrases to do non-scientific studies to prove their own biases and presumptions. Kidding themselves that whilst these issues are not being cured by it 'wouldn't it be worse if we weren't doing this', so they daren't remove them having entirely convinced hemselves after having put their signature on the line and sold it to their partners as a money-saver that it genuinely isn't changing 'what could have been'.

 

My n=1 sample. Once I went on a date with a cardiologist. To my surprise, half of the time I had to listen to how placebo is real and great stuff, how cancer patients with a positive attitude do better and it really works etc. He responded with this cancer stuff after I told him how it annoys me that some people say they can fight off covid easily just because of their positive attitude and willpower and it attacks those who fear it. Then he went on to defend the anti-vaxxer group of doctors we have here (winners of the annual Flat Earth Award), saying that covid hasn't actually been such a big deal, it was overblown.

He was both a cardiologist and an ER doctor, actively doing both and told me about how patients with psychosomatic illnesses tend to show up after midnight at the ER. He also added that this means they have such mental issues that this manifests in physical symptoms. (I already had my ME/CFS but didn't tell him about it.)

It is true that he didn't specifically talk about people with cardiological issues and the magic of their positive attitude but based on the above, it wouldn't have surprised me.

(To be honest, this wasn't the only issue with him, he said many other problematic things too, for example that women who wear red - simply the colour - are slutty, etc. Yes, @Shadrach Loom , I timetravelled again!)

 

I’m genuinely beginning to wonder about hostile state compromises of Hungarian dating apps. Malicious mismatching just shouldn’t be happening at that scale.

 

Unfortunately it is more due to what the market has to offer. There is a lot of bigotry here in general. When I was still planning to have kids my "test question" on dates was what they thought about gay people because I wanted to know what kind of future our potential child will have if he/she turns out to be gay. And you really don't want to know the kind of answers I got and how often. It was not rare at all to get truly horrifying responses. It is still very possible to find non-bigoted men here though but you have to dig deeper than it would be ideal. So you may have to expect more timetravel stories.

 

The irony of my heart rate going up just from reading about your date.

 

The King looked at his domain, content that the Sun he made rise this morning is giving light and food to his subjects, and ultimately to him and his court. He could not stop thinking of what tragedy would befall his kingdom if one day he failed to rise up, and bring the Sun with him.

Oh, King, how marvelous is the Sun you brought up this morning, light of all life. For certainly it would have remained forever dark had the King not blessed our world with his divine presence.