That’s sort of what I was thinking; ethics aside, I wonder how a specialist telling the girls that they have Acute Hypermovement Syndrome, and the treatment is this prescription that they need to take every day for the next month (consisting of sugar pills), and after that they should be feeling much better would work. I have no doubt that you can think yourself into a lot of trouble; why not think yourself out again?
Yep, sounds like it could have been. Of course, you would have to rule out actual nerve damage and other causes.
One of the girls on TV appeared to be faking. There was something to deliberate and well timed about her movements. That doesn’t mean she was faking, but there are probably some fakers whenever the symptoms start to spread and gain notoriety.
And it seems even within the group that is suffering the problem there is a divide, wherein if some manage to deal with it one way and others don’t, then one of the groups gets put in the “not really” category – as if people can’t understand that what works for person A need not work for person B.
Like **Derleth **said, psychological health issues, or indeed anything that can’t be mechanistically treated, are dealt with rather dismissivelly by large segments of our population.
BTW, re: Brokovitch or the like – that is a no-win situation. If I prevent them digging about on a fishing expedition then I MUST be covering something up, right? But, if I let it proceed and they find traces of ANYTHING, then I’ll have to spend serious dough defending a case to prove there’s no cause-and-effect link and in the public opinion it’ll STILL mean I am covering something up.
Unless and until you define what you mean by ‘mechanistically’ here, I’ll thank you to not stuff things into my mouth.
Psychological issues should be treated in the same scientific (what’s now called “evidence-based”, I suppose) manner as, say, typhoid fever or a genetic propensity to Type II diabetes. This doesn’t always happen, due to a distressing number of witch doctors hanging on in the field, but it’s a definite goal to strive for.
I don’t think antibiotics or insulin will help much.
No, but antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication, perhaps other things (blood pressure meds in some cases? Changing or dealing with hormones via birth control pills/hormone therapy etc…IANAD, so those are just WAGs) could address a biochemical issue that is leading to the psychological symptoms. Mental illness is as much an illness as diabetes or malaria and in many cases there are medications that can help. Our brains function via chemical pathways the same way our kidneys or liver do; if those chemical pathways are messed up or deficient or overactive, there are drugs we can use to correct them, same as with any other organ.
We like to think that we have full conscious control of our minds, but we don’t. Chemistry happens, whether we want it to or not.
And they don’t help with AIDS or a broken leg. What’s your point?
If they do go that route, perhaps they’ll at least start with Brockovich.
The “or indeed anything…” clause was MY parenthetical. My apologies if the way it was written got it confused with the attribution to you about psychological conditions not getting the right attention. And “Mechanistically” here referring to having a patently obvious course of treatment that works in almost every case as opposed to requiring individualized adaptation and tailoring.
I don’t think anybody here is opposing or excluding approaches that address the neurochemistry side. At least I hope nobody is.
You recommended them as treatments for mental disorders. I assume it was unintentional and you meant “in an analogous scientific manner”. Of course I’m still wrong, as some mental disorders are caused by bacterial infection and insulin imbalances.
Oh, I did not, and you’d only think I did if you honestly can’t read English.
A (properly-defined) disease has a single cause, which can only possibly respond to a given treatment or range of treatments, but any given patient is a roiling mass of diseases, bad habits, and what are generally considered ‘pre-existing conditions’. The role of the person doing the treatment is to get at the cause of the primary complaint, or at least the thing they’ve been brought in to solve, without making anything else worse. You can’t do that ‘mechanistically’ in the way you seem to think.
OK, now you’re the one adscribing meanings to my words. *** I’m not*** the one saying there must be simple mechanistic approach, I’m saying that there’s people out there that expect that, and that hinders getting the right attention to people.
Or: I AGREE WITH YOU DAMNIT
This didn’t come through very well in your post and, frankly, the whole concept of ‘mechanistic medicine’ is such a dumb idea I don’t know why you’d bring it up at all.
That is exactly what you said. I did not think that was what you intended.
Actually, I think the modifier “say” in the above sentence implies a meaning of “similar to”. If the “say” was omitted, then the sentence would indeed be literally* a direct recommendation for insulin and such for psychological issues. However, “say” confers a less direct relationship, with the diseases after it being examples in the class of “physical illnesses with scientific treatment”.
*however, context matters and the literal reading is not always paramount
Back to the case at hand, I wonder how many historical events have been cases of mass hysteria, conversion disorder, or other such illnesses. Salem witch trials is a known example. Some of the behavior around the great awakenings, as well. Perhaps some other religious events. I’m sure there are plenty more