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100 Years Later: The Lessons of Encephalitis Lethargica

antares4141

Senior Member
Messages
576
Location
Truth or consequences, nm
Interesting 100 years ago they didn't interpret this as psychogenic:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/n...0-years-encephalitis-lethargica/#.Wu4kIMbGzdQ

Same for Celiac:
https://www.cureceliacdisease.org/wp-content/uploads/SU07CeliacCtr.News_.pdf

I'm sure there are other examples where Dr's demonstrated their ability to conduct themselves in a professional and competent manor?

Maybe only after a little bit of abuse to their patients, Helicobacter pylori & Lyme.

Putting into context the fact that their are no such things as conspiracies. It seems so weird especially in this day and age, with all the technology at their fingertips. Why there is such an aversion from authority figures when it comes to recognizing ME and other conditions like GWS. As a "real" illness.

If I were to speculate I would guess it has a lot to do with liability and saving face.
 
Messages
15
Interesting 100 years ago they didn't interpret this as psychogenic:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/n...0-years-encephalitis-lethargica/#.Wu4kIMbGzdQ

Same for Celiac:
https://www.cureceliacdisease.org/wp-content/uploads/SU07CeliacCtr.News_.pdf

I'm sure there are other examples where Dr's demonstrated their ability to conduct themselves in a professional and competent manor?

Maybe only after a little bit of abuse to their patients, Helicobacter pylori & Lyme.

Putting into context the fact that their are no such things as conspiracies. It seems so weird especially in this day and age, with all the technology at their fingertips. Why there is such an aversion from authority figures when it comes to recognizing ME and other conditions like GWS. As a "real" illness.

If I were to speculate I would guess it has a lot to do with liability and saving face.

I think doctors don't like to be in a position of not having the answers and so if they don't know then it must be psychiatric. Multiple sceloris and epilepsy were treated in a similar way. It is now coming to light that many psychiatric illnesses have a biological basis. e.g. anxiety, SAD, some types os shizoprenia...hence the rise of neuropyschiatry.

The history of ME / CFS is a complex one with very muddy waters and careers based on certain theories mean there is a lot to loose not just financially.
 

alex3619

Senior Member
Messages
13,810
Location
Logan, Queensland, Australia
The modern psychogenic movement started with Charcot and then his student Freud. Its not even close to two centuries old. There was a resurgence in 1977 (?) or so due to Engels publishing his BPS theory. However the underlying ideas date back to the 1930s. I wrote a three part blog on this. So far as I am aware it was the early 20th century in which these ideas started to take off, largely driven by psychanalytic theories, nearly all of which have been thoroughly discredited. They are certainly unscientific.
 

alex3619

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

antares4141

Senior Member
Messages
576
Location
Truth or consequences, nm
" I have said this before but I think it is worth repeating: if we have a psychosomatic illness because a physical illness cannot be objectively shown, how is a psychosomatic illness any more valid since it cannot be objectively shown?"

Good point! I have a lot of issues with the supposed medical condition. Just would take too much time to properly dissect, I'm not as qualified to do it as I would like to be, and it would make a long article.

I just read the first link. Hard to get my head around it in one pass. But thanks for the links! Plan on going back to them.
 
Messages
15
" I have said this before but I think it is worth repeating: if we have a psychosomatic illness because a physical illness cannot be objectively shown, how is a psychosomatic illness any more valid since it cannot be objectively shown?"

Good point! I have a lot of issues with the supposed medical condition. Just would take too much time to properly dissect, I'm not as qualified to do it as I would like to be, and it would make a long article.

I just read the first link. Hard to get my head around it in one pass. But thanks for the links! Plan on going back to them.

I've recently joined Phoenix Rising looking for support, but I'm finding the length of discussions and way that they seem to go in different directions very hard to follow. My ME brain fog and limited cognitive ability is sorely challenged. I'm wondering if I have joined the right group? Looking for support and information in a friendly way. Don't mind discussion of different ideas - we are all different, a fact which happens even with well defined and physically / biologically diagnosed illnesses!

Hard to get my head round a lot of stuff on here at the moment. :sleep:
 

CreativeB

Senior Member
Messages
482
Location
Scotland
I understand Jellylegs. The information across the forums is varied and sometimes complex and confusing. I think you need to focus on the ones you think might help you, rather than trying to read everything otherwise it can be overwhelming.

Overall I think the forums are great ... I'm fairly new here myself
 

frozenborderline

Senior Member
Messages
4,405
The modern psychogenic movement started with Charcot and then his student Freud. Its not even close to two centuries old. There was a resurgence in 1977 (?) or so due to Engels publishing his BPS theory. However the underlying ideas date back to the 1930s. I wrote a three part blog on this. So far as I am aware it was the early 20th century in which these ideas started to take off, largely driven by psychanalytic theories, nearly all of which have been thoroughly discredited. They are certainly unscientific.
I found this quote on the wiki talk page for hysteria, it's very eloquent summation:

"Freud attended Charcot's clinic in Paris at a time when neither cranial X-ray nor EEG were available to rule out such items as closed-head trauma or epilepsy, both of which in retrospect afflicted many of Charcot's most pivotal cases as he worked up his theory of hysteria. The infamous Monsieur Log case, that of a man who was injured by a runaway cart, had been severely concussed and was comatose for a time, is possibly one of the worst examples of a neurological misdiagnosis in the history of medicine. In retrospect, much of what Charcot concluded falls down since it can be explained now very simply as obvious organic disease. Freud took these questionable learnings back with him to Vienna and, after being nearly laughed out of his profession for proposing a version of the vile repressed memory theory, came up with his conversion theory as "plan B", drawing not only on Charcot's misdiagnoses but also his own failure to recognize what are now plainly obvious as cases of such organic diseases as temporal lobe epilepsy and even cancer. To what extent this deeply unscientific idea continues to affect medicine adversely is anybody's guess, but there are credible commentators who have observed that hysteria was well on its way to being given the decent burial that it so sorely needed when Charcot and Freud resurrected it on the strength of towering diagnostic error. By so doing they added immeasurably to human suffering by re-introducing a virulent superstition into clinical practice, i.e. hysteria and all of its euphemistic variants such as somatoform disorder. These are at best, diagnoses of ignorance."

I can't believe people aren't learning from stuff like this. The history of hysteria would be a great thing for critical anti-psychiatry literature to address in depth
 

frozenborderline

Senior Member
Messages
4,405
The modern psychogenic movement started with Charcot and then his student Freud. Its not even close to two centuries old. There was a resurgence in 1977 (?) or so due to Engels publishing his BPS theory. However the underlying ideas date back to the 1930s. I wrote a three part blog on this. So far as I am aware it was the early 20th century in which these ideas started to take off, largely driven by psychanalytic theories, nearly all of which have been thoroughly discredited. They are certainly unscientific.
The thing that I think is most interesting is not that these theories have roots in psychoanalytic ideas, but how even though psychoanalysis has fallen out of fashion in practical terms, the most harmful ideas, like hysteria, have remained. Any modern psychologist will tell you "we don't believe in that freudian stuff anymore" and yet it seems like freud's influence is still there--as a subtle malignity that infects every aspect of psychology and psychiatry...

All of the supposedly more rational modern psychology is still a kind of cored-out Freudianism in my opinion.
 

Wolfcub

Senior Member
Messages
7,089
Location
SW UK
I found this quote on the wiki talk page for hysteria, it's very eloquent summation:

"Freud attended Charcot's clinic in Paris at a time when neither cranial X-ray nor EEG were available to rule out such items as closed-head trauma or epilepsy, both of which in retrospect afflicted many of Charcot's most pivotal cases as he worked up his theory of hysteria. The infamous Monsieur Log case, that of a man who was injured by a runaway cart, had been severely concussed and was comatose for a time, is possibly one of the worst examples of a neurological misdiagnosis in the history of medicine. In retrospect, much of what Charcot concluded falls down since it can be explained now very simply as obvious organic disease. Freud took these questionable learnings back with him to Vienna and, after being nearly laughed out of his profession for proposing a version of the vile repressed memory theory, came up with his conversion theory as "plan B", drawing not only on Charcot's misdiagnoses but also his own failure to recognize what are now plainly obvious as cases of such organic diseases as temporal lobe epilepsy and even cancer. To what extent this deeply unscientific idea continues to affect medicine adversely is anybody's guess, but there are credible commentators who have observed that hysteria was well on its way to being given the decent burial that it so sorely needed when Charcot and Freud resurrected it on the strength of towering diagnostic error. By so doing they added immeasurably to human suffering by re-introducing a virulent superstition into clinical practice, i.e. hysteria and all of its euphemistic variants such as somatoform disorder. These are at best, diagnoses of ignorance."

I can't believe people aren't learning from stuff like this. The history of hysteria would be a great thing for critical anti-psychiatry literature to address in depth
Ah....Dr Freud....
A good example of someone who went up their own where-the-sun-doesn't-shine....and never came out again.
Completely nuts in my opinion, and contributed a lot of what comes out of where-the-sun-doesn't-shine -to "Science"..

Now Dr Jung, there was an interesting mind. I would have liked to have known him.
 

frozenborderline

Senior Member
Messages
4,405
Ah....Dr Freud....
A good example of someone who went up their own where-the-sun-doesn't-shine....and never came out again.
Completely nuts in my opinion, and contributed a lot of what comes out of where-the-sun-doesn't-shine -to "Science"..

Now Dr Jung, there was an interesting mind. I would have liked to have known him.
Nietzsche said "every philosophy is in fact a form of unconscious confession of its originator" and I believe this applies doubly to freud's theories!
 

Wolfcub

Senior Member
Messages
7,089
Location
SW UK
I've recently joined Phoenix Rising looking for support, but I'm finding the length of discussions and way that they seem to go in different directions very hard to follow. My ME brain fog and limited cognitive ability is sorely challenged. I'm wondering if I have joined the right group? Looking for support and information in a friendly way. Don't mind discussion of different ideas - we are all different, a fact which happens even with well defined and physically / biologically diagnosed illnesses!

Hard to get my head round a lot of stuff on here at the moment. :sleep:
Same here too @JellyLegs
There is so much I can't quite "get my head around" also. Hard core medical science wasn't on my agenda (never thought I'd need it! haha!)
But slowly, slowly, my compromised brain cells can absorb a little here and there, sometimes....when my brain is in gear that is. I have to take it bit by bit but do pick up valuable information. I am a good learner but a slow learner.
I also am very grateful for the research so many have done and are happy to share here.
But I have found this forum to be so friendly. Have you checked out the "Community" pages?