Shorter's article from February 2015 was bad enough that Psychology Today pulled it and Shorter put a heavily edited piece in its place.
@Bob thoughtfully saved a copy of the original at
http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...chronic-fatigue-syndrome-is-back-1-pdf.10038/ . At the very least, Shorter is absolutely convinced that ME is not a biomedical disease, and that researching it is pointless.
Yes I remember that event, and my impression of Prof Edward Shorter is that he may not have much understanding or insight into biochemistry, which is why he (like many of the somatoform psychiatrists who are also "biochemically challenged") prefers pseudo-intellectual psychosocial waffle to hard empirical evidence.
But I'd just like know where Edward Shorter is supposedly "demolishing psychosomatic illness," according to Prof James Coyne.
In Shorter's 1992 book,
From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era, he does not appear to be demolishing psychosomatic illness; it's clear that Shorter roughly aligns to the dimwitted ideas that Simon Wessely holds on the etiology of functional disorders.
This review of Shorter's book says:
Shorter's thesis is that since the dawn of modern medicine, sufferers of psychosomatic illness unconsciously produce symptoms of whatever disease happens to be fashionable among the more delicate members of the upper-middle class. Their behavior is reinforced, Shorter says, by pricey "society doctors" who indulge them by accepting their patients' self-diagnoses.
From the above, it looks like Shorter is a true believer of the idea that functional diseases are psychosocially-caused.
The irony Shorter has missed is that the only psychosocially-caused conditions here are his own unsubstantiated beliefs that functional disorders have a psychosocial etiology. Shorter probably inculcated himself with such beliefs by uncritically reading Wessely and Co, without noticing how very little empirical evidence there is for such psychosocial etiologies.
Readiness to uncritically adopt a belief, combined with a refusal to reality check your beliefs against empirical evidence, creates the sort of flimsy pseudo-erudite output of Wessely and Shorter.
The above book review also indicates the sort of flimsy anecdotal evidence that Shorter uses to try to support his silly ideas:
In one case, a young German woman hysteric--near death from the effects of fits, paralysis and self-starvation--compelled her surgeon to remove her ovaries, a standard treatment in the mid-19th Century for hysteria. After the operation she quickly regained her health and suffered no further symptoms. Yet her surgeon later revealed to his colleagues that he had faked the operation. He merely made shallow incisions on her abdomen, leaving her ovaries intact.
Obviously, you cannot use one-off second-hand anecdotes like this as empirical evidence to support your ideas. In any case, it is pretty easy to deconstruct this anecdote, and show that it does not necessarily support the idea that the woman's symptoms were psychologically-caused: even though her ovaries were not removed by the operation, it is well-known that surgery unrelated to ME/CFS can have dramatic effects on ME/CFS. There are many accounts, even on this forum, of ME/CFS being precipitated by surgery — even minor surgery using local anesthetics.
So surgery does appear to not infrequently modulate the course of a functional disorder such as ME/CFS. Thus the incisions alone, and/or the physiological effects of the anesthetic used in this faked operation, could easily have been enough to alter the status of this patient's functional disorder.
Shorter should spend more time examining the biochemical grass roots of functional diseases, rather that imprisoning himself in the ivory tower of his own abstract but off-the-mark intellectual edifices.
