I think we probably understand them well enough to be able to say that it’s most unlikely that a virus would cause a person to start producing dyed fibres of cotton and nylon out of their skin.
The point I was trying to make is that: no, it doesn’t.
Consider, as a non-related analogy - there is a subset of mental illness that seems to result in people hoarding things - and the details of the cases are often strikingly similar - stacks of newspapers, bottles of urine - this is sometimes coupled with the collection of absurd populations of pet animals - a huge number of cats, or birds, or ferrets, or whatever.
The people to whom this happens probably don’t confer or copy one another - they just all broke in the same sort of way. The human brain and mind is not completely random, therefore it should not be surprising that, quite independently of one another, people can be ill in some way and suffer the same kind of psychological symptoms.
But “hoarding” is simply an on-off behavior, one either hoards everything or they don’t, and hoarders have other behaviors in common, too. If you found that a lot of hoarders hoarded only newspapers dated on Tuesday, and otherwise their house was tidy and utilitarian, and they didn’t know that millions of other hoarders gathered only Tuesday papers, you would then be required to explain who so many people only saved Tuesday papers. That is a specificity akin to the symptoms that are described by Morgellon sufferers, who are afflicted by the same senstaion and event that presents in only one part of their body.
It’s important to remember that delusional parasitosis is far from a new ailment, and clinical features very similar to “Morgellon’s disease” have long been known to dermatologists and other medical professionals, including the presentation of lint and other crud to doctors as “evidence” of parasitic infestation.
Media reports and Internet sharing of experiences have helped popularize this disorder. Despite the wrinkle or two added by people like Mary Leitao), the essential features have been known for centuries.
OK, how about a different example:
Sleep paralysis - people in this state often perceive the illusory presence of a malicious entity in the room with them.
Why would it not be possible for a psychological disorder to manifest very specific symptoms in people? Our brains are not all exactly the same, but they are also not completely different either.
In fairness, many medical journals require authors fees, and the open access formula is increasingly popular among well respected journals (PLOS for example). That said, I agree with the rest of your assessment. This study is crap.
I read it that way too. Symptoms: thinking Portuguese agents are all around you, fear of bamboo spears.
Yes, it is absolutely the case that many journals require authors’ fee (PNAS, a fine journal, comes to mind). However, the fees that that particular cosmetic dermatology journal is charging (just under $2000 per article) are hardly justified when the journal, itself, is doing little more than posting the authors’ pre-typed, pre-set manuscript on its web page. In plain terms, it’s a money-making business.
I did not mention open access (except indirectly, to point out that that journal has none of the costs that a ‘traditional’ journal has with respect to things such as paper, binding, print and typesetters, etc.) and definitely did not impugn that category of journals. Indeed, as you point out, the on-line PLOS is a very good journal)
This. Psychosomatic =/= “imaginary”
Definition of psychosomatic: " Of or relating to a disorder having physical symptoms but originating from mental or emotional causes."
For example, hives or cold sore outbreaks can be real physical symptoms triggered by emotional states.
Because every person, in childhood, has an experience in which they have this specific fear – that there is a malicious person likely to enter their room while asleep – and this is a pre-established fear culturally instilled. What else could a child possibly be afraid of in their beds in a dark room? Children have even been told by their parents that this entity has a name: Bogey-man, or whatever. If they do not hear about this from their own parents, they will surely become conversant with it from their peers by the time they graduate from kindergarten, or from the body of standard literature or the fare of TV entertainment directed at their age cohort..
I doubt if very many children are inflicted with warnings or threats of crawling sensations in their temples. You are playing fast and loose with a definition of “specific” symptoms.
As, it seems, are you. It doesn’t matter where the underlying fear or condition comes from (assuming you’re even right about this as the root of the sensation people experience during sleep paralysis) - the point is that a particular state of the human nervous system results in a common - yet illusory - experience.
Anyway, what are you saying? that you think there was something actually crawling in your temples?
No. I’m saying it is perfectly obvious why nearly everyone experiences, especially in childhood, a near-sleep sensation that there is a frightening person in the room. It is far from equally obvious why a statistically significant number of people feel something crawling in their temples without any conscious forewarning of such an event.
I was contrasting to a false analogy in a previous post, not attempting to explain the phenomenon that is the subject of this thread. Which I think is pretty clear from what I wrote.
Prior to having a mild heart attack, I had, for several months, an occasional tingling in my left are similar to what one feels when one’s arm is within an inch of a strong source of static electricity (like a roll of plastic bags at the supermarket). There was no source of static electricity, and it was not psychosomatic, nor was it “illusory”. There was a physiological event taking place elsewhere in my body that triggered this symptom.
Similarly, the localized symptom described for Morgellons could be an indicator of some other physiological event occurring in the person’s body, which so far has not shown itself to be serious enough (like a heart attack) to require medical attention that can be associated with the history of the Morgellons phenomenon.
I don’t think anyone is disputing that physiologic reactions/sensations are occurring in “Morgellon’s” sufferers, just that a parasitic or other infection is responsible.
Read up on reactions to placebos (inert ones which should logically have no capacity for producing negative effects), and you’ll be amazed at the constellation of symptoms and signs of disease that have been documented - occasionally quite serious.
The human mind can powerfully influence what the body experiences.
I get alot of comprehension from medical folks this way when explaining computer issues, kinda works both ways:
Working on computers and working on people is often more alike than people think. They all follow the same basic rules but every persons normal is a little bit different. and like people there is a duality that comes into play properly diagnosing and treating problems between hardware and software, hardware being the physical, OS and software being the personality.
Take a random sample of a million people and you will find damn near every bit of weirdness known to medicine somewhere in that pool.
I think the pendulum may have shifted overmuch when it comes to the construct that “everyone is different”, and so all diagnoses and treatments have to be individualized (for that seems to be the way it’s heading, at least in the minds of believers).
True, there’s increasing evidence that some treatments vary in success depending on individual genetic markers, and maybe in the future anticancer agents and certain other drugs won’t routinely be administered until blood and tissue tests are given to determine who’ll benefit the most.
But we’re still a lot more alike than different. Most evidence-based therapies work quite well across a wide spectrum of individuals. And too often, the “we’re all different, what works for one may not for another” argument is an excuse used to promote quackery. “Super Miracle Supplement X didn’t work for you? Try the rest of our products until something is effective, remember we’re all different so don’t pay attention to those skeptics.”
I think all analogies are probably futile here, because they will inevitably be describing something that’s different, and can therefore be dismissed by just saying “but that’s different!”
Regardless, I dispute your assertion that specific psychosomatic symptoms can’t be common across a number of individuals without communication between them. I don’t think there’s very much reason to believe that would be true.
The arrogance and ignorance of so-called medical “professionals” is really astounding. This must have been what it was like back when educated and intelligent individuals were trying to convince the blind establishment that the world was not flat. New diseases emerge all the time, and simply because a doctor is too incompetent to reach an accurate diagnosis, does not mean he should dismiss a condition as “imagined.” We have seen how that has come back to bite people in the past. The National Institute of Health is now acknowledging Morgellon’s disease Characterization and evolution of dermal filaments from patients with Morgellons disease - PMC . Recent peer-reviewed journal articles have shown co-infection with Lyme disease and bird mites, fiber bundles were identified both in broken and under unbroken skin that are composed of keratin and collagen, with a relationship to degradation of myelin sheath surrounding nerve cells. The disease already has existed a long time in bovine/cattle (certainly not that hard to imagine that it could jump to the human population), the stories among many are consistent, 70% of the people who get this were hiking or in woods or working in gardens or around dirt before their symptoms began, etc. I personally recently discovered that I have this condition even though I never scratched myself to the point of having open sores and seeing the fibers, but I did have the typical symptoms and clinical diagnoses after hiking of Lyme disease which progressed to fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, autoimmune, Spectracell tests showed extreme cellular damage, there were changes in visual depth perception, dizziness, and other conditions. When I would start to get a rash like scabies in the past I discovered that really hot water applied would make the itch stop and it would go away. I never thought it was some systemic parasite that just moved to another part of the body. But a few months ago by accident I discovered the fibers and visible bugs after applying a lotion that contained some antiparasitic component. I was showering 3 times a day and practically naked so was not redepositing all this debris onto myself. I would put the lotion on clean skin and about an hour later if I rubbed my body anywhere grit-like particles would be on my hands, then what looked like black specks, then small white objects that looked like larvae, and oval black bugs of very small and medium size were literally coming out and on my hands. Then when I would shower I would see the fibers floating in the bathtub - at first very translucent white bundles, then after a few weeks I started noticing short wiry red fibers in the bath (and I was wearing no red and after already scrubbing my entire body and then bathing in a fresh bath - there is no source for where these consistent fiber-like products would be coming from except my body), and I have only seen a few of what might be considered light blue. They are all very small like thin sewing thread. Again, never complained of scratching or fibers coming out before, have no history of mental illness, was a research scientist and high-level manager for 20 years before I became so weak and dizzy it was hard to work around chemicals, and I did have some biting, crawling, pinching sensations at night, but I never saw anything so “logically” assumed it was false nerve signals firing due to my screwed up health condition. I have seen these things come out of every part of my body and I am glad to finally see research ermerging that validates what some people have been suffering with for 20 or 30 years and being told by idiots that they must be imagining. I also have to wonder since I began natural treatments and the bugs seem to be reduced but not gone, I have not had a single migraine headache which I used to get twice a week, so are parasites a cause of most migraines? Anyways, its really embarrassing how bad of a medical community we have in the Western world. According to JAMA, over a million people a year die from “orthodox” medicine from doctor errors, drug side effects, unnecessary surgeries, hospital-acquired infections, etc. They kill far more people than any natural medicine does, yet we trust these geniuses to diagnose us accurately? Enough said.
The NIH has done no such thing. This is a case report in a low-impact journal (indexed on PubMed, a database overseen by NIH), involving a grand total of four patients, from authors who mistakenly claim Morgellons is an “emerging” disease (it actually is an imaginary one debunked by careful study, most recently in research co-sponsored by the CDC).
I regret you are having distressing symptoms, but there are medical professionals who can help you deal with them.
It’s long past time to let the concept of “Morgellons disease” go. And politicians like Dianne Feinstein and Hillary Clinton should be embarrassed at having pressured government health officials to waste money investigating this.
From the summary of that article…
So, the NIH hasn’t exactly endorsed anything.
Still not buying it.
Here is the study on the website of the dermatology journal where it was originally published. There’s just a copy on the NIH website, and that doesn’t indicate any endorsement by the NIH.