Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

While it may be true that CFS people have trouble getting doctors to take their symptoms seriously, it is also true that researchers who investigated psychosomatic origin of CFS had to to discontinue their research due to the number of death threats they were receiving.


An interesting thing is the number of conditions attributed to psychosomatic causes has been steadily shrinking over the last 100 years.

50 years ago if you had IBS or crohn's disease your doctor would send you to a psychiatrist


This is just not good reasoning. Just because some things have been mechanistically explained in the past 50 years doesn't mean that any arbitrary condition will eventually be non-somatically explained. In fact, the argument (vacuous as it is) could go the other way - anything that has left after we've shrunk the pool so considerably is considerably more likely to not have a non-somatic mechanistic explanation than anything in the original pool.

And FWIW, CBT is effective for IBS. But with the gut-brain connection, we really are pushing up against the bounds of mind-body dualism with stuff like this.


30 years ago if you had an ulcer they'd send you to a psychiatrist.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: