• Welcome to Phoenix Rising!

    Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of and finding treatments for complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia (FM), long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.

    To become a member, simply click the Register button at the top right.

Edward Shorter reviews SO'S book It's All in your Head

Messages
13,774
Battle of the dimwits.

There are no references. No authorities are invoked. This is the author, a veteran neurologist, speaking to us from the heart.

No evidence invoked, only the assumed authority of a veteran neurologist. Sounds like Shorter's cup of tea... he just seems unhappy that she's promoting slightly different prejudices to his own.
 

duncan

Senior Member
Messages
2,240
If O'Sullivan walks away after reading this review with a vague feeling he may have slighted her book a little too much...that he drew attention to the book's weaknesses and underscored its omissions perhaps a tad more than he needed to...well, likely it's all in her head.
 

me/cfs 27931

Guest
Messages
1,294
I always quote the IOM report when doctors suggest my condition isn't physical. Perhaps I should have this on a card in my wallet.
Some health care providers have been skeptical about the serious physiological — rather than psychological — nature of the illness (ME/CFS). Once diagnosed, patients often complain of receiving hostility from their health care provider as well as being subjected to treatment strategies that exacerbate their symptoms...

Beyond Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome stresses that (ME/CFS) is a medical — not a psychiatric or psychological — illness.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK274235/
 
Last edited:

Forbin

Senior Member
Messages
966
I don't know why he seems to think that patients "suggest themselves into" dizziness because it is "culturally appropriate," by which he appears to mean "untestable."

It is certainly easy enough for a doctor, particularly a neurologist, to objectively confirm dizziness by checking for nystagmus (involuntary eye movements). With a little more effort, balance impairment can even be quantified by objective tests of the vestibular system.

An M.D. would know this.
 

GreyOwl

Dx: strong belief system, avoidance, hypervigilant
Messages
266
And I don't think it's been "culturally appropriate" to faint during the normal course of one's day since the American Civil War, and even then only if one was wearing a corset.

Shorter is an historian, isn't he?
 

Kati

Patient in training
Messages
5,497
And I don't think it's been "culturally appropriate" to faint during the normal course of one's day since the American Civil War, and even then only if one was wearing a corset.

Shorter is an historian, isn't he?
Yes, historian, working for the psychiatry department of school of medicine at University of Toronto. :bang-head::bang-head::bang-head:
 

Large Donner

Senior Member
Messages
866
are appropriate symptoms. (And the culture has largely ceased to sanction “paralysis” as a convincing symptom – too easy to disprove with a negative Babinski.)

This shows what an idiot the man is, there is no such thing as a negative Babinski. You either produce Babinski sign or you don't. I don't even know what he means by a negative Babinski.

It's like if you put some ham in a sandwich you simply have a ham sandwich. I would have no idea how one would produce a negative ham sandwich, perhaps you have to make it with cheese.
 

Sidereal

Senior Member
Messages
4,856
I don't know what "culture" he lives in where fatigue, pain and dizziness are "acceptable models of presenting illness" but I have experienced nothing but skepticism, bullying and derision from MDs and family/friends/coworkers when I "presented with" those symptoms.
 

alex3619

Senior Member
Messages
13,810
Location
Logan, Queensland, Australia

[Satirical] The culture can be a source of suggestion as well, a subject on which psychobabblers are silent. The culture can tell us that its all in your head ideas are acceptable models of presenting illness, and these patients turn up in physicians’ surgeries with somatoform or bodily distress disorder. They do not in fact have a putative psychiatric illness but have been indoctrinated, as have the psychiatrists, into believing their chronic pain, fatigue and dizziness are in the mind because the culture says the mind is all powerful.
 
Last edited:

alex3619

Senior Member
Messages
13,810
Location
Logan, Queensland, Australia
My unprovable hypothesis is better than yours, no it's mine...
ME has physiologically verifiable pathophysiology, dating back to tests originating from 1940, 1946, 1949 and 1954. Psychogenic explanations have ... we are still waiting to see if they have anything at all. It seems to be all rhetoric, postulating, and circular reasoning.

Even better, brand new technology used in ME research is starting to show a myriad of things we never knew how to test for before now.
 
Last edited:

A.B.

Senior Member
Messages
3,780
I don't know what "culture" he lives in where fatigue, pain and dizziness are "acceptable models of presenting illness" but I have experienced nothing but skepticism, bullying and derision from MDs and family/friends/coworkers when I "presented with" those symptoms.

My experience has been very consistently that of not being taken seriously, or the severity of the problem being downplayed.

When I first had problems as teenager with school attendance due to crippling fatigue, my account of symptoms was rejected, and people around me preferred to believe it was school phobia with faking of symptoms, or some bizarre conversion of anxiety into symptoms, when there was literally no reason to believe this explanation.

People like Shorter sit on a comfortable chair all day, completely out of touch with reality, and unwilling to listen to the patients that might actually teach him something on the subject. He prefers his fantasies, that coincidentally look a lot like hateful prejudice masquerading as medical diagnosis.
 

chipmunk1

Senior Member
Messages
765
Reality did not survive contact with prof. Shorter.

Sad that the book needs a non-medical doctor to comment on it favorably. Presumably because most medical doctors including psychiatrists don't want to be associated with this embarassing superstitious freudian bullcr*p anymore.

Shorther is simply a mysogynist regardless of whether or not he likes to admit it.

One of his recents articles on Psychologytoday.

Clinically, someone like William Styron is totally different from the legions of “depressed” young female undergraduates on every campus. That doesn’t mean that these young women don’t have legitimate psychological issues, but they are not Styron’s issues, who lay coiled in a fetal ball on his bed.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...ressed/201606/the-big-divide-in-us-psychiatry

See the female patients are always less sick than they would like to be. Even Depression is not a legitimate diagnosis in a young female. Of course, males on a college campus never ever have a "Depression" diagnosis that's why he needs to refer to the students as female undergraduates.

They will never be like Styron.
 
Last edited:

alex3619

Senior Member
Messages
13,810
Location
Logan, Queensland, Australia
Philip K Dick, apparently:
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Phili...n.27t_Fall_Apart_Two_Days_Later.22_.281978.29

These psychobabble theories conflict with reality in so many ways, and have done for centuries, even before Charcot and Freud. The question that arises, repeatedly, is how can supposedly intelligent people be so wrong, so often, and still be clueless?

They might not believe in ME, but we still have to live with it.
 

chipmunk1

Senior Member
Messages
765
Probably because they don't have enough contact with patients for their misconceptions to fall apart.

They have either never seen a single patient in their life like prof. Shorter - Despite that they are still experts on the subject, interesting, isn't it? - or they simply disbelieve anything patients tell them, Patient= delusional and should not be listened to.
 

Bob

Senior Member
Messages
16,455
Location
England (south coast)
Edward Shorter said:
They do not in fact have an occult organic illness called “ME” but have suggested themselves into their chronic pain, fatigue and dizziness because the culture says those are appropriate symptoms.
Really? And is it the same with post-Ebola syndrome? Does he actually believe this crap? And why have the BMJ published this prejudiced, harmful and hate-filled propaganda?
 
Last edited: