Psychosomatic is a word that’s gets often used as if that would mean that illnesses aren’t real.
If you tell someone with an allergy to cats to imagine that they are stocking a cat, that can be enough to trigger the allergy symptoms. The fact that an imagined cat is good enough to trigger the allergy shows quite clearly that the allergy is partly psychosomatic as it can be triggered psychologically.
The underlying mechanisms of such an immune response are however deep. One model of long COVID is, that it’s partly about autoimmune issues. Those might be as psychosomatic as the above example of cat allergy. There’s a neuronal pattern that gets the body to trigger defenses in a misaligned way.
Psychosomatic is a word that’s gets often used as if that would mean that illnesses aren’t real.
If you tell someone with an allergy to cats to imagine that they are stocking a cat, that can be enough to trigger the allergy symptoms. The fact that an imagined cat is good enough to trigger the allergy shows quite clearly that the allergy is partly psychosomatic as it can be triggered psychologically.
The underlying mechanisms of such an immune response are however deep. One model of long COVID is, that it’s partly about autoimmune issues. Those might be as psychosomatic as the above example of cat allergy. There’s a neuronal pattern that gets the body to trigger defenses in a misaligned way.