41–50 of 78 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pseudoscience is not necessarily bad. Most of psychology and philosophy, for instance, is essentially pseudoscience.
It's certainly bad when it's concerning physical medicine.
It is sickening that a talented guy can't get a job just because he needs to work part time to manage a disease.
Really? Sickening? There are any number of candidates available that won't require special consideration to manage a disease, so why should someone solely take on the charity burden of giving this fellow a job?
Part time? You get a talented developer for 30 hours a week, paying the same hourly rate as everyone else.
Working from home? Depending on the role he may be even more productive than those in the office. I have just two more words to say about it: 37 Signals.
The point of the article is not to try to explain all of that shit to you, but to try to make you understand what it's like to be that sick all the time. Try to take in that message first, and when you think you have the slightest idea what it's like to live like that, maybe you are then qualified to add a response.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're kind of proving his point, aren't you? Your default assumption is that his roommates are probably right. What if he had crippling fibromyalgia? Or some horrendous cancer? > especially when he complains about being tired all the time He never said he complains all the time. He says he is tired; he did not say he complains that he is tired all the time. So why did you immediately conclude he must complain all th…
Actually I didn't say his roommates were right, I said there may be an explanation for why they are behaving as they do, which is a misunderstanding of his situation based on the fact he possibly plays a lot of video games or surfs the web to blog, and yet says he doesn't have any energy to do anything. I never said he wasn't sick. But his roommates could misunderstand the nature of his illness, and hear him complain…
He admitted himself that they are great people, and the fact they are behaving so strangely to him indicates to me that there is some other dynamic going on that we don't have an explanation for.
Ask anybody with an "invisible" malady and they'll tell you that some depressingly large percentage of the people they care about don't believe they're actually sick.
This is a very unfortunate story, and it's also very unfortunate that the author hasn't been helped by medical science. The author's subjective suffering should not be up for debate. Idiopathic pain and fatigue disorders are impossibly frustrating to diagnose and treat, and have a tremendous negative impact in a person's quality of life. That said, this post has many hallmarks of pseudoscience, and I'm afraid that th…
Medical practitioners outside of mental health seem relatively unaware of these disorders, but if you speak with a psychiatrist, you may receive some useful info. It's worth a shot.
Here are a couple sources for further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_disorder
This is a good book on going about recovery. You'll have to forgive the title; the reason it's there is the physical site for these disorders tends to follow trends in society, and at the time of writing back and neck pain were the most common occurrences (it's consistent with the theory behind these disorders that such trends would exist), AND a very large proportion of chronic back/neck pain turn out to be psychosomatic. http://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Recovery-Back-Neck-Pain-ebook/dp...
It's also interesting to see the page for the Seattle Repetitive Injury Support Team, which (after a majority of their members solved their problems) now feels convinced that the most troublesome, persistent repetitive strain injuries are psychosomatic. http://www.satori.org/rist/
You can also see the extents that I went to to avoid physical activation of my symptoms, here: http://tiledtext.com
That's how convinced I was that they were physical, though now I have no doubt about their mental origin—and I can use computers almost completely freely now :D
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're kind of proving his point, aren't you? Your default assumption is that his roommates are probably right. What if he had crippling fibromyalgia? Or some horrendous cancer? > especially when he complains about being tired all the time He never said he complains all the time. He says he is tired; he did not say he complains that he is tired all the time. So why did you immediately conclude he must complain all th…
When he's complaining about a disease with no name, it might be worthwhile to provide a bit more medical background about the progress of his illness. Like many 'woe is me' stories on the internet, this left me with a lot more questions than answers and reading it ultimately proved to be a waste of my time. I feel sorry for the author but found his account of problems too incoherent to puzzle out, apart from the fact…
There are probably a lot of people in your life who (like him) suffer from things you can't easily see.
It's something we'd all do well to remember.
I have a close friend who's always going to see specialists with some ailment or another. One of the things he has is low magnesium and zinc just like this author. He's also suffered from bouts of unexplained amnesia (is that where the author got the name for his blog from? If so maybe they actually have the same thing!?). His sleep schedule is completely screwed to the extent that i hardly see him and he never gets sunlight. He has serotonin and dopamine issues. I actually checked the blog in detail to make sure it's not the same person. It isn't. Just a weird coincidence.
He's never been diagnosed with anything specific either.
Like the friends of this guy in this story I honestly do suspect he is lazy. I see him playing 100+ hours a week on his steam profile and he plays more than just steam games. He's currently well into his 30's and he's missing out on life.
I actually don't know what to do. I honestly feel that tough love would help him more than anything. In this article this guy says his friends keep him up saying “You need to force yourself to have a better sleep schedule.”. I'm tempted to do the same for my friend to try and get him into a sensible sleep schedule. I guess that's wrong but i can completely understand it.
Leaving it at status quo is unacceptable in my opinion. Even with a disability he's still not making the most of life - the ridiculous sleep schedule where he never see's the sun has to stop. Giving him time to sort his shit out doesn't work. He's been like that for 15 years now.
This is a very unfortunate story, and it's also very unfortunate that the author hasn't been helped by medical science. The author's subjective suffering should not be up for debate. Idiopathic pain and fatigue disorders are impossibly frustrating to diagnose and treat, and have a tremendous negative impact in a person's quality of life. That said, this post has many hallmarks of pseudoscience, and I'm afraid that th…
Pseudoscience is not necessarily bad. Most of psychology and philosophy, for instance, is essentially pseudoscience.
This is a very unfortunate story, and it's also very unfortunate that the author hasn't been helped by medical science. The author's subjective suffering should not be up for debate. Idiopathic pain and fatigue disorders are impossibly frustrating to diagnose and treat, and have a tremendous negative impact in a person's quality of life. That said, this post has many hallmarks of pseudoscience, and I'm afraid that th…
I've got to second that it's probably worthwhile for the author to check out and consider the wikipedia article. I pretty much gave up programming for six years, utterly convinced that I had a physical disorder causing me constant pain in wrists, hands, elbows, shoulders, etc. I tried all kinds of physical approaches during that time, many of which would appear to impact it in one way or another, but none that really…
What's the best way to deal with something like this as a friend of someone with something remarkably similar? I have a close friend who's always going to see specialists with some ailment or another. One of the things he has is low magnesium and zinc just like this author. He's also suffered from bouts of unexplained amnesia (is that where the author got the name for his blog from? If so maybe they actually have the…