Dr David Tuller: In Guardian Column, Professor Pariante Parrots Standard Biopsychosocial Nonsense

[Countrygirl]

https://www.virology.ws/2021/05/01/..._nXRmo8iql2UnU6bYivZP3DRKngoa0lPrL3PuGS6-Cpkw

Trial By Error: In Guardian Column, Professor Pariante Parrots Standard Biopsychosocial Nonsense
1 May 2021 by David Tuller 1 Comment

By David Tuller, DrPH

On Tuesday (four days ago), The Guardian published an opinion piece from Professor Carmine Pariante titled “Long Covid is very far from ‘all in the mind’–but psychology can still help us to treat it.” The article is the latest from a member of the biopsychosocial ideological brigades to demonstrate what has long been apparent—those who proclaim that others are falling into an unhelpful mind-body dichotomy are using this argument to deflect attention from the failings of research into their favored interventions. Professor Pariante is a psychiatrist based at King’s College London, the home of Professor Trudie Chalder, Professor Sir Simon Wessely, and other leading lights of the biopsychosocial firmament, so he is likely steeped constantly in a brew of self-reaffirming but unwarranted assertions.

Professor Pariante’s piece has been published in the wake of two articles by Guardian columnist George Monbiot. The first column, in January, expressed alarm about the epidemic of Long COVID cases. The second column, published last month, took a sledgehammer to Professor Michael Sharpe’s creative accusation that Monbiot was causing Long COVID just by having written about it in the first place. It was clear from Monbiot’s second column and a detailed Twitter thread that he’d quickly learned a whole lot about the PACE trial disaster................

 

[nerd]

Indeed, even the historical distinction between a mental and a physical disorder is fuzzy when we look at individuals rather than clinical labels. This distinction was never intended to explain the cause of a disorder but rather to describe its main manifestations

This is a fundamental problem in modern medicine, i.e. the symptomatic definition of diseases by the manifestation but not by causal pathology, and the therapeutic approach based on this pathology-unspecific definition.

 

[Pyrrhus]

This is a fundamental problem in modern medicine, i.e. the symptomatic definition of diseases by the manifestation but not by causal pathology, and the therapeutic approach based on this pathology-unspecific definition.

Yes. This fundamental problem needs to be fixed, but it won't be fixed until we better understand causal pathology of common diseases.

Unfortunately, we can't research the causal pathology of common diseases until we stop pretending that we understand a disease just because we know the symptoms and believe that treating the symptoms is the same as treating the cause of the disease.

Only the field of cancer research is just now beginning to understand that cancers should not be classified by the part of the body they are found in, but rather by the genetic mutations that define the tumors.