It's Not All In Your Head

I don't think that the origin of the problem is this or that social structure. I think that these structures bind it in one way or another to make this basic human condition bearable. Both for the individual and for society. But they determine to a large extent who benefits from the dichotomy of being and consciousness. Nor do I believe it can be overcome or cured. To be human is not just to have knowledge of and insight into the world and knowledge of and insight into oneself. It means knowing that this knowledge gives agency. An extremely powerful tool for survival, something special. But this tool is at the same time an instrument of torture of itself. It reflects also its transience and insignificance. You may survive today because you are the cunning hunter, but one day you will die. And nothing, what ever you've done or knew will change that. And another day, everyone who remembers that you and your kind ever existed will be gone. And nothing, what ever you've done or knew will change that. In the end, it even will seem like there never was anything at all. And nothing, what ever you've done or knew will change that. Facing that and dealing with it is the basic premise of human consciousness.

Most of the time we have coped with rituals, religion and rules. Recently we have science, technology, entertainment industry and consumption. Art and Drugs have always played a role in escaping the torment.

Most can't face it without the help of the above, some even flee the terror of consciousness through suicide.

I think there was a fair enough number of people who act that way that I didn't think the exaggeration would require this level of explanation.

I've lost count of the number of doctors that told my late wife the headaches were all in her head (Mentally to be clear here).

When she laid down, she had no headache. When she would be upright the headache would return. This is frequently, and incorrectly, called "An Afternoon Migraine".

After nearly two decades, because the Medical Establishment had written her off as a mental case, she figured out what she had herself, which was Intracranial Hypotension due to Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) Leaks.

CSF Leak detection is still a developing area of medical research. We desperately need better imaging technology than we have today. CSF Leak detection is still in the "Stone knives and Bearskins" category. Hopefully the brilliant people that hang out here can help with that...

Karen eventually killed herself because of what had become constant pain from the CSF Leak and poisoning by the Fluoroquinolone antibiotic Levaquin (Cipro is in the same drug class; the FDA itself says to only use this class of Meds as the last resort yet the doctors give it out like candy).

Karen's Journal was part of a FDA hearing in 2015 about the damage these antibiotic cause.

Her whole messy saga became one of the featured stories in the documentary Pain Warriors which is free to watch on Amazon Prime and TubiTV. It can be found other places as well. It is NOT a warm and fuzzy thing to watch.

The bottom line is be responsible for your own health and NEVER blindly trust what anyone in the Medical Establishment tells you. Do your own research on your condition etc...

I'm sorry for your loss.

Fluoroquinolones are indeed scary. I was saved from them in college by my hypochondria, when I developed a UTI and my doctor prescribed one to me. I googled, found tendon damage issue and asked for a different Rx. Years later, I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and told never to take this class of antibiotics, since our faulty collagen triggers this side effect and can cause arteries to rupture.

The article portrays a simple dichotomy: mental versus physical. But there is something interesting going on with psycho-social explanations. Given the epistemological difficulties one rather expects extended fights between the proponents of rival psycho-social theories. But the tendency is for one such theory to win and obliterate its rivals.

Consider ME/CFS. The human body has remarkable powers of recuperation. Feel ill with a cold? Just take two weeks off to rest and you will recover. Broken bone? That will need splinting, but again it will heal up in six weeks. Ah! Now we come to the difficulty. There are standard times, two weeks, six weeks; what happens if something goes wrong and healing takes a lot longer?

One psycho-social explanation of ME/CFS is that patients aren't patient. Something nasty has happened, bio-medically, and they need to take two year out of their hectic life to recover. After six months they cannot take resting and pacing any more and do too much, too soon, provoking a major relapse. That restarts the clock on two years to recover. Rinse and repeat indefinitely. Call that "trying too hard".

The rival psycho-social explanation is that patients are deconditioned due to too much rest and need to exercise and build up their stamina on a "normal" schedule. Call this "not trying hard enough". This doesn't really work as an explanation because some of the patients are ex-athletes and familiar with training and building back up systematically after time off for an injury or illness. They are going to the doctor because they have done what always worked in past, because it hasn't worked this time. The rival psycho-social explanation isn't relevant to the actual problem.

It is worse than that. NASA attempts to study the effects of weightless on the ground, in gravity, by having people lie in bed and get deconditioned. Deconditioning is a rather delicate effect. It depends on a rigid discipline of lying down all the time. The effects wear off rather quickly. Crucially the effect wears off monotonically. It is not like ME/CFS with its key symptom of Post-Exertional Malaise: sufferers think they are getting better, but a day or two later, wallop, they have a flare up of symptoms.

The natural expectation is for a fight between psychologists. "Trying to hard" versus "not trying hard enough". One expects it to be a one-sided fight. "not trying hard enough" is a much worse fit to what the patients experience.

Back in the real world "not trying hard enough" has won a total victory. When patients are angry about the "not trying hard enough" explanation, that is understood as anger about the psycho-social model, as if there were only one. The important question is "Why prefer the implausible psycho-social model over the plausible one?". And that question is difficult to ask.

The article manages to skip over the central issue with popular "all in your head" explanations. It is not that they compare unfavourably with "physical illness" explanations. The problem is that they compare unfavourably with less popular "all in your head" explanations. What is going on there?