Psychosomatic illness, real physical symptoms but its suspected a psychological cause, including the microwave attack on embassy staff in Cuba

[kropotkin]

Pseudoseizures are defined as non epileptic movements that look like seizures but have normal brain function during them. They are not physical but psychological phenomena. This isn't anything to do with ME.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

not only arrogant on the part of the medical profession, it shows they haven’t learnt from history.

heaven forfend

Let's be honest, "psychosomatic" in modern healthcare means "we don't have to do anything, unless it's billable in which case wave a dead chicken at it". It's all very well saying "psychosomatic symptoms are real" (which they are) but it isn't part of the structure of how healthcare is delivered at all. The absolute last thing you want to be diagnosed with is "somatisation disorder" because that means for the rest of your life, you could be dying of something and if the medic reads your notes you'll likely just be ignored.

eta: don't want to derail, the main case of this thread is interesting though. There are a lot of issues both political and psychological. I can quite easily see the CIA convincing the embassy staff of the country it works for that they are being attacked by Cuban mind control rays, and bringing about the described symptoms.

 

[kabbes]

Pseudoseizures are defined as non epileptic movements that look like seizures but have normal brain function during them. They are not physical but psychological phenomena. This isn't anything to do with ME.

So you are postulating a psychological phenomenon that has normal brain function and yet produces a seizure. A psychological phenomenon with zero physical observable effect other than to produce a massive physical effect that, of course, can’t have an origin other than a mysteriously unobservable psychological one.

I mean, it could be. Or it could be another pathology with a pathway that current medical science just hasn’t figured out yet, like all the other supposedly psychosomatic problems of the past. Hysteria, anyone?

 

[kropotkin]

No, a pseudoseizure is when someone simulates a seizure-you can do it yourself by pretending to have a seizure. Most people aren't conscious of doing it-it usually isnt deliberate.

 

[yield]

Psychogenic non-epileptic seizures sounds fairer than pseudoseizures.

kabbes Cartesian dualism

 

[Riklet]

Lol CIA spooks and US employees all randomly getting ill and brain damage in 2 different regions, both very much anti-US...

Excuse me if I don't think this is psychosomatic in the least bit. Clearly sthing fishy going on whatever some bbc daftie thinks. I'm sure this has zero in common with chronic illness etc

 

[WouldBe]

Pseudoseizures are defined as non epileptic movements that look like seizures but have normal brain function during them. They are not physical but psychological phenomena. This isn't anything to do with ME.

I didn't say it had anything to do with ME just pointing out that medics can and do 'missdiagnose' conditions when they can't work out what's causing it.

 

[Edie]

Its much odder to think that the mind doesn’t influence the body to me, especially when we have such concrete every day examples. Headache after a stressful day, anxiety and sweaty palpitations, heartache etc.

Oliver Sacks the neurologist who wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat had a functional neurological disorder after an accident and lost the use of his leg. He wrote a very carefully observed book about it:https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/83/9/864

Psychological causes of symptoms really isn’t controversial in medicine, and shouldn’t be stigmatised.

 

[kabbes]

Of course the mind influences the body, but there’s a big leap from that to then state that people are presenting with diseases that are generated entirely by psychological dysfunctions that are opaque even to them. The brain is a material object operating as part of the body system but that doesn’t make it some mystical system responsible for generating any disease that can’t be currently tested for. The fact that anxiety and other stresses generate known impacts on, eg, cortisol doesn’t mean that it also produces just any physical consequence you want to make up.

There’s a big claim here that is being obscured behind more mundane realities. Exactly what is the mechanism by which each specific psychosomatic problem is manifesting? Don’t just hand wave it away with “psychology”.

 

[kabbes]

This isn’t just an academic debate, of course. A lot of people over the years have suffered for many years without proper medical attention because they have been labelled as “psychosomatic”. And then it subsequently turned out that the origin of their distress was something physical after all, but just something that the medical world hadn’t envisaged. Indeed, one such person made a rather good film about it.

 

[WouldBe]

Don’t just hand wave it away with “psychology”.

Careful or we'll be back to miasmas or fits of vapours.

 

[HAL9000]

Of course the mind influences the body, but there’s a big leap from that to then state that people are presenting with diseases that are generated entirely by psychological dysfunctions that are opaque even to them. The brain is a material object operating as part of the body system but that doesn’t make it some mystical system responsible for generating any disease that can’t be currently tested for. The fact that anxiety and other stresses generate known impacts on, eg, cortisol doesn’t mean that it also produces just any physical consequence you want to make up.

There’s a big claim here that is being obscured behind more mundane realities. Exactly what is the mechanism by which each specific psychosomatic problem is manifesting? Don’t just hand wave it away with “psychology”.

It might be that we don't know exactly what's happening in the brain to cause the condition, but if something is labelled as psychosomatic and a psychological approach can help the person then a psychosomatic label can help. If you jump to 15 minute mark, Suzanne talks about treating people with psychosomatic paralysis, the treatment is a combination of psychology and physio threapy.

Also in the pod cast (I can't remember when it was discussed), Suzanne talks about research where a volunteer pretends to have a psychosomatic condition and is then compared with someone who is diagnosed with a psychosomatic condition. Looking at both brains in a functional MRI scanning shows different parts of the brain being activated, so there's a change in the brain, but exact details might be unknown.

Short to medium term, the podcast highlights that a psychological treatment might be useful for some people given the limitations in our understanding of what's going on in the brain.

Long term, understand exactly what's going on in the brain and fix the problem.

If you take something like schizophrenia, we don't know what causes schizophrenia

Causes - Schizophrenia

we have a long way to go to fully understand the brain.

 

[RubyToogood]

The woman in the podcast came across as patronising and arrogant. But anyway.

I have a funky new illness called Persistent perceptual postural disorder (3PD for short). It's a recent reclassification of a subset of balance disorders. Many people get a bout of dizziness caused by crystals in the wrong bit of the ear, and most people get over this. However people like me who have an existing anxiety disorder (I've had agoraphobia and panic attacks since my early twenties) are more likely to develop this longer term disorder.

Your actual balance system has generally recovered, but your brain has overadjusted to being off balance and no longer trusts it. Instead it relies more on visual information, which means that seeing a lot of visual movement makes you dizzy and nauseous because your brain thinks you are moving.

As I see it, the way we separate mental and physical phenomena is just wrong. Anxiety disorders involve huge amounts of physical symptoms. It's not just your faulty thinking causing them, once that hormonal process is triggered it's very difficult to switch it off.

The above illness demonstrates that well. No part of it is conscious, or even particularly thought related. Your brain just goes into a state of high alert to protect you from falling and refuses to come out of it. (They offered me CBT as part of a study but I declined because I didn't believe their model for how it was supposed to work. Antidepressants have worked though.)

 

[Aladdin]

I'll never forget attending a lecture given by a guy who proceeded to tell the 80 people sat there that disease was actually
"dis ease". He started going on about heart attacks being as a result of "the pain of loss..emotional injury".
I wasn't having any of it.
Stood up and challenged him. I gave him a right going over. To which he responded "oh you're very emotionally invested...have you lost someone to a heart attack? " and that was when I really gave him down the banks and gave him the difference in figures for Western world heart attack vs say Japan. Diet issues etc.
He tried to dismiss that info...saying the Japanese meditate. Bullshit...I called. They're living in a country where they have to be pushed into trains. They're as stressed as anyone in the west. Their diet is very different. High in fish and veg. He still wanted to pretend heart attacks were phychologically triggered.

Total plonker.
Selling tripe woo woo shit and making a living from vulnerable people.

 

[Flavour]

Now it's happening in Vienna too

'Havana syndrome'-like mystery illness affects Vienna US diplomats

The Biden administration is investigating cases of "Havana syndrome" among US officials.

www.bbc.com

 

[gentlegreen]

Katherine Horton has married fellow crank William Binney.

 

[yield]

State Dept. names new coordinator on 'Havana Syndrome' cases

Investigators have been studying a growing number of reported cases by U.S. personnel around the world.

www.politico.com

AP. 11/05/2021

Several hundred cases are under investigation. There have been multiple reports in recent weeks of potential incidents linked to visits by high-profile U.S. officials, including a case involving a member of CIA Director William Burns' traveling party in India and incidents at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Colombia, prior to a visit by Blinken.

The State Department said Friday that Deputy Secretary Brian McKeon had met with diplomats in Vienna to discuss possible cases reported this year in Austria. The department said it had taken a “number of important steps, none of which we can detail publicly, to protect our personnel.”