Was Stephen Hawking’s Illness Psychosomatic? (No)

I wish this paper had been published while Prof Hawking was still alive. It might have made him think twice about accepting an invitation to appear on stage at the RSM next to the person who has played a lead role in promoting and popularising such unhelpful ideas for the past three [edit, typo] decades.

 

Here's a 2012 article from Scientific American: How Has Stephen Hawking Lived Past 70 with ALS?

The article focuses on the variable nature of the disease, which includes a slowly progressive form that has a juvenile onset. The thrust of the article is that Hawking was indeed an outlier, but outliers do exist.

 

Very interesting article.

A few years ago my mother died of MND. She was just shy of 90. She suffered from it for at least 8 years, probably more, and had a very sharp mind right until the end. She had no trouble with breathing when she died (prematurely from a deliberately prescribed overdose of medication, which she approved).

She had been having extreme difficulty swallowing for several years but would accept no help from anyone when it became very serious because she understandably just wanted to be done with it and die asap. We communicated with a child's magnetic board in the 7th year. In her last year she completely lost the motor ability to write, and her communication was in the form of grunts - and screams of frustration at times when others simply took charge of her. Her pet hate was people who bent over to her wheelchair level and spoke to her as if she were deaf and dimwitted.

The first symptoms I ever noticed were an occasional loss of balance, then, shortly after, a slight difficulty pronouncing words with the letter L in them. Strangely, she didn't notice this for years. Early on she resorted to a walker but after lots of overbalancing falls and more black eyes, even using the walker, she bought herself a wheel chair.

She was diagnosed in the 6th year as having an atypical type of MND - atypical because it had been going for so long already and she was still pushing her own wheelchair, speaking, writing etc.

She was in a nursing home for two years before the diagnosis and was treated in the way old people in nursing homes often are - like a dependent child. Before her diagnosis, she was pushed and pushed by staff to get out of the wheelchair and use a walker, which she could, but she refused because she knew her balance was very precarious. What the staff saw was someone who could take a few steps without toppling over so they assumed she was catastrophizing and was in danger of becoming deconditioned due to false beliefs about her health!! She was referred to a physiotherapist and was told a psychologist could help. We saw the physio, which was a waste of time, and she refused to see the psychologist. I can only imagine her frustration.

This highly intelligent woman, who did cryptic crosswords, jigsaw puzzles and read daily until her last year, and was totally in charge of her life, was rightly confident that she knew herself better than anyone. Not being of the generation that was bombarded with daily psychobabble or believed there was anything wrong with her 'psyche' that needed to be fixed, she controlled her life and her death from MND on her own terms. I am full of admiration that she never doubted her self-knowledge for a minute. I wish I had been conscious of this side of her many years earlier and learnt from it!

 

Delusion delusional illness beliefs beliefs.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1132911695045758976


eta:
interesting thread

 

Wow, just Wow.