The cool thing about the “psychosomatic” diagnosis from the doctor’s perspective is that it is a convenient, utterly non-disprovable “diagnosis” that offers closure to the doctor: “I found out what is wrong with the guy” instead of admitting failure: “Well, there is a problem but I don’t know what it is.” It also sends the patient on a long (month to years) therapy loop which offers plenty of time for the problem to resolve on it’s own (which happens frequently). An additional perk is that any question or doubt of the patient can be chalked up to “being defensive / in denial” or “uncooperative” which is of course a symptom of the underlying psychopathology.
Yes. My uncle, who is a doctor working in gastroenterology, was talking about basically the exact same topic last week. He said that they’re highly confident a significant number of patients are having entirely or near-entirely psychosomatic illnesses, but it’s incredibly difficult to identify when that is specifically happening, and unfortunately due to time and money constraints they have a tendency to just slap the label on difficult cases. We just do not know enough about the human body and how the brain affects it to be confident outside of extremely obvious cases. Even a lot of what we do know is being reexamined in the last two decades due to edge cases being discovered and lack of rigor in earlier testing.
Sure, absolutely, poor mental health worsens physical health, and some debilitating condition have no apparent physical causes.
But this doesn’t make them hurt less. It doesn’t provide a resolution.
My episode beginings have a significant correlation with stressful events. I am perfectly aware of this. I would still, really really, like a way to interrupt the resulting destructive cascade other than going “well, it would have been better not to have been stressed”.
The cool thing about the “psychosomatic” diagnosis from the doctor’s perspective is that it is a convenient, utterly non-disprovable “diagnosis” that offers closure to the doctor: “I found out what is wrong with the guy” instead of admitting failure: “Well, there is a problem but I don’t know what it is.” It also sends the patient on a long (month to years) therapy loop which offers plenty of time for the problem to resolve on it’s own (which happens frequently). An additional perk is that any question or doubt of the patient can be chalked up to “being defensive / in denial” or “uncooperative” which is of course a symptom of the underlying psychopathology.
Yes. My uncle, who is a doctor working in gastroenterology, was talking about basically the exact same topic last week. He said that they’re highly confident a significant number of patients are having entirely or near-entirely psychosomatic illnesses, but it’s incredibly difficult to identify when that is specifically happening, and unfortunately due to time and money constraints they have a tendency to just slap the label on difficult cases. We just do not know enough about the human body and how the brain affects it to be confident outside of extremely obvious cases. Even a lot of what we do know is being reexamined in the last two decades due to edge cases being discovered and lack of rigor in earlier testing.
That label also just does not achieve anything.
Sure, absolutely, poor mental health worsens physical health, and some debilitating condition have no apparent physical causes.
But this doesn’t make them hurt less. It doesn’t provide a resolution.
My episode beginings have a significant correlation with stressful events. I am perfectly aware of this. I would still, really really, like a way to interrupt the resulting destructive cascade other than going “well, it would have been better not to have been stressed”.