worldbackwards
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It's like QED isn't it.I learned was that it is not well understood and behavioural therapies(GET) would be a possible treatment.
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It's like QED isn't it.I learned was that it is not well understood and behavioural therapies(GET) would be a possible treatment.
Good find, @chipmunk1! The BPS BS machine chugs on.Another interesting finding: Fatigue in liver disease can be biopsychosocial.
The BPS people are like petty criminals, aren't they? If it's not nailed down, they steal it.
This is much older than BPS. Psychogenic medicine was failing when BPS gave it a new fancy name and theory, without actually providing any substance. Its more like a slick version of a con game. No matter what happens, no matter how you get caught, you always deny wrongdoing and pretend innocence, or point the finger of blame somewhere else.The BPS people are like petty criminals, aren't they? If it's not nailed down, they steal it.
That's kind of how the field of psychology works, it's mostly subjective. You can't separate the mind from the body, so yes, psychogenic illness is proven to lead to many physical alignments like cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure (scientifically also called hypertension) allergies, asthma and others. Watch Gabor Mate, what he speaks sounds reasonable.Lots of revealed truth, little evidence of anything.
Okay, agreed, they're not separate entities, there's really only a body. The "mind" is not a "thing" but just a collection of capabilities and activities of one bit of the body, mainly the brain. A bit like your knee being able to bend. Bending your knee can affect other bits of your body (like the blood rushing to that area from other parts). And so can using your brain (e.g., if you're frightened, it can initiate the production of chemicals that then circulate through your body).You can't separate the mind from the body,
What you notice is the first explanation is really elegant and simple. The second one is much more complex. You'd need a really good reason to prefer the second over the first. You'd need strong evidence. The other thing you notice is that for the second explanation, you have to assume the brain has quite extraordinary and sustained ability to modify other body systems. I'd wanna see evidence of this too.
The BPS people are like petty criminals, aren't they? If it's not nailed down, they steal it.
Okay, agreed, they're not separate entities, there's really only a body. The "mind" is not a "thing" but just a collection of capabilities and activities of one bit of the body, mainly the brain. A bit like your knee being able to bend. Bending your knee can affect other bits of your body (like the blood rushing to that area from other parts). And so can using your brain (e.g., if you're frightened, it can initiate the production of chemicals that then circulate through your body).
So let's see how that goes, now thinking in a totally non-dualistic way. Not separating the mind from the body at all. What's causing, say, cancer now? Could it be some cells are reproducing in your body that your immune system should have killed but missed (cos it doesn't work perfectly 100% of the time, or because it was busy at the time fighting off some infection or whatever)? Would that seem plausible?
Now let's try the psychogenic view, again not separating mind and body. Maybe you were thinking really negative thoughts or having really negative feelings, and they were so negative that your brain somehow ended up producing too much of some chemical (maybe a glucocorticoid, for argument's sake), and this reaction was intense enough and sustained enough that it messed up your immune system, and caused it to miss the cancer.
What you notice is the first explanation is really elegant and simple. The second one is much more complex. You'd need a really good reason to prefer the second over the first. You'd need strong evidence. The other thing you notice is that for the second explanation, you have to assume the brain has quite extraordinary and sustained ability to modify other body systems. I'd wanna see evidence of this too.
So, I guess I'm just playing thought games. But I just wanted to point out that the claim that "you can't separate the mind from the body" can't just be usedwilly-nilly to justify psychological explanations for illness. It comes at a price. It requires that we talk about these things in a truly non-dualistic way.
(PS. This is in no way intended as a criticism of you @amaru7. What you said just got me thinking about the whole thing. Thanks for posting.)
rant over.....
I was just thinking the same thing, @user9876. How did the negative thoughts get there? Those thoughts could themselves be outcomes of some other bodily process. Lots of diseases seem to give rise to depression that is disproportionate to what you'd expect from the loss of quality of life alone (e.g., Parkinson's, left hemisphere stroke). And they're only the ones we know about for sure.What are the mechanism, why those thoughts and not other thoughts?
And yes, "negative thoughts" is itself vague.
Selective causal inferences based on cherry picked correlations, arbitrary statistical thresholds, and vague subjective definitions, and all in the face of objective evidence to the contrary.I don't think the proponents of psychogenic illness should be allowed to get away with vague statements that they claim are hypothesises but should be pushed to define mechanisms.
I really like this analysis. I think it very effectively debunks a certain kind of naive psychosomatic view.Okay, agreed, they're not separate entities, there's really only a body. The "mind" is not a "thing" but just a collection of capabilities and activities of one bit of the body, mainly the brain. A bit like your knee being able to bend. Bending your knee can affect other bits of your body (like the blood rushing to that area from other parts). And so can using your brain (e.g., if you're frightened, it can initiate the production of chemicals that then circulate through your body).
So let's see how that goes, now thinking in a totally non-dualistic way. Not separating the mind from the body at all. What's causing, say, cancer now? Could it be some cells are reproducing in your body that your immune system should have killed but missed (cos it doesn't work perfectly 100% of the time, or because it was busy at the time fighting off some infection or whatever)? Would that seem plausible?
Now let's try the psychogenic view, again not separating mind and body. Maybe you were thinking really negative thoughts or having really negative feelings, and they were so negative that your brain somehow ended up producing too much of some chemical (maybe a glucocorticoid, for argument's sake), and this reaction was intense enough and sustained enough that it messed up your immune system, and caused it to miss the cancer.
What you notice is the first explanation is really elegant and simple. The second one is much more complex. You'd need a really good reason to prefer the second over the first. You'd need strong evidence. The other thing you notice is that for the second explanation, you have to assume the brain has quite extraordinary and sustained ability to modify other body systems. I'd wanna see evidence of this too.
So, I guess I'm just playing thought games. But I just wanted to point out that the claim that "you can't separate the mind from the body" can't just be usedwilly-nilly to justify psychological explanations for illness. It comes at a price. It requires that we talk about these things in a truly non-dualistic way.
Perhaps Woolie's line of thinking needs to be extended to address this model: the challenge to proponents of the model would seem to be that the behaviours that they claim are perpetuating the disease ought to be measurable, and the physiological way in which they perpetuate the disease also ought to be a physically measurable thing.