Your link does not show a National Institutes of Health acknowledgement, as you claim. It’s a link to an article in a journal of dubious reputation, run by Dove Press. Dove Press is known to have published articles with poor peer review and is not considered high quality.
Until recently, reviewers didn’t even have a “reject” option on reviews.
I’d take that “endorsement” with a huge grain of salt.
Every Morgellon sufferer I ever met in clinical practice (maybe three?) was a grade A fruitcake. I know this thread is a zombie but just wanted to say that I doubt this impression belongs to me only, even though Journals and whatnot don’t come right out and say it that way.
It’s easy to get that impression from online forums which invoke conspiracy theories to explain Morgellons which include chemtrails, nanotechnology and extraterrestrials, and advocate use of equine antiparasitic drugs and/or heavy-duty commercial insecticides.
One sociologist studying the Morgellons phenomenon said it “seems to be a socially transmitted disease over the Internet”.
It should be emphasized that in a small percentage of cases, there are “real” causes (inflammatory skin conditions, known parasites like scabies, internal medical complaints that cause itching etc.)
I’m not sure this follows. Investigation is *always *worthwhile. If Morgellons had turned out to be a non-psychosomatic illness, you’d be crucifying them for failing to investigate.
And Morgellons is an illness–even if it is psychosomatic and/or the result of mass hysteria, the sufferers are really, legitimately suffering. And you don’t treat psychosomatic illnesses by telling the sufferer that they’re imagining everything. Sure, their brain is the cause of their suffering. But not their conscious brain. They’re *not *lying or faking, and to state they are is a real oversimplification.
I do not have Morgellons, nor have I ever met anyone who claimed to have it.
I also see that I posted something quite similar to this back when the thread was created. Go me!
No - I looked into “Morgellons” long before the CDC did their investigation, and it was glaringly obvious at that time that this is a bogus illness, where people who have itchy skin then get convinced by others on the Internet that they have critters crawling around and under their skin.
Once every actual disease on the planet is eliminated, then maybe you could say that investigation is a good thing, but as it is, this investigation took resources which could have been used to figure out real diseases.
No it’s not - it’s a bogus diagnosis for symptoms that are caused by something else.
Has anyone here suggested that these people aren’t actually suffering? You don’t treat any disease by lying to people and telling them that the cause is something that it’s clearly not.
if we had unlimited funds, personnel and facilities for scientific research, we could look into anything we want. In this case we wound up spending $600K that would have been far more useful elsewhere.
We may have taken apart that low-rent derm journal article before, but it’s worth noting that aside from its very small sample size, there were no controls whatsoever. Collagen and keratin are found in everyone’s skin. The forms they described in the “Morgellons” patients could very well be present in normal skin too, or in chronically inflamed/picked at skin in people with known dermatologic problems, but the authors didn’t bother to check on that.
About the claim of spirochetes in the “Morgellons” patients skin - they don’t look convincing to me, quite variable in size/conformation and very possibly the sort of detritus that commonly shows up in silver stains and makes evaluation difficult (I’ve looked at tons of silver stains and false positives are not uncommon). And even if there were spirochetes, the finding would be meaningless without analyzing controls too (you couldn’t rule out the presence of spirochetes in asymptomatic people as part of normal skin flora).
All in all, a wretchedly bad paper.
Well, some aspects of sleep paralysis can be confirmed by people other than the sufferer: I get it frequently and can tell my partner exactly what she was saying to me as she tried to wake me up, and she does things like holding my eyes wide open that I would definitely react to if I were awake.
The malicious entity in the room has pretty obvious explanations: your brain is trying to wake up, and will use what it can perceive to create something that makes sense. It’s not surprising that this is a scary thing.
Having someone “sit on your chest,” another common symptom, is due to you not being able to breathe in a normal awake way.
There’s nothing mysterious about it at all.
Man, I hate finding little hairs in my fruitcake.
An illness doesn’t require you to know what its name is to have it. Your illness likely WAS psychosomatic - physical symptoms with a psychological cause. You don’t have to be aware of the fancy name of the particular version of the disease.
(Or maybe it was an environmental irritant you unknowingly got rid of or something, that’s always possible.)
Lots of things that are “totally obvious, man!” need to be scientifically investigated, because people are often wrong and the truth is often counterintuitive. It’s just a coincidence that your bias was confirmed by a scientific study. If humanity approached medicine in this way, physicians would still be bringing women to orgasm to treat hysteria. :smack:
I wasn’t suggesting anything mysterious - I was arguing that it is not implausible for psychological conditions to manifest in the same way (in detail) for different people without any collusion.
I think there might be something to the B12 thing/nutritional deficiency. The only person I know that claimed to have Morgellon’s is likely deficient since she follows a vegan diet and gluten free. She’s not especially crazy or gullible but does tend towards conspiracy stuff.
But sleep paralysis isn’t a psychological condition, it’s neurological.