Why are those pretend-sick people so darned UPPITY?

[chiller]

Damian Thompson has recently used the Daily Telegraph to highlight the difference between blogging and journalism.

"... medical science has no great difficulty explaining what’s wrong with most people diagnosed, or self-diagnosed, with ME. Their brains create a debilitating fatigue and pain that often correlates with certain personality traits.

Comments

[actually_not]

Isn't the core of the problem really the stigma of mental illness as much as anything. There seems to be this false dichotomy between psychiatry and neurology which always seems (to me) to be a hang up about the existence of the soul and the separation of mind from body. Once you accept that the brain is just another fleshy part of the body and that symptoms it displays are part of a medical condition (be it depletion of neurotransmitters or deposition of abnormal proteins in cells or subtle changes in the cell membranes that fuck up nerve transmission) then we're left with "Yes, you have a horrible illness which is causing this constellation of symptoms and we don't know why". We don't know why depression or schizophrenia happen either and we're moving away from 'pull yourself together' on those matters so why not ME/CFS? The brain has a much bigger role to play in general body homeostasis than was ever guessed.

[chiller]

I appreciate that. Mental heath is horribly stigmatised in this country. The problem is: this is not a mental health condition, and cannot be defined as such unless you presume that all the symptoms are psychosomatic

[actually_not]

Yes, I can see that psychosomatic is not the word and I agree that Wessely's attitude is unhelpful

[chiller]

Like everything else with this, the blood thing isn't continual - it happens only when I am bad enough that my hair starts dropping out. ;)

The point is, if we don't know whether this is mitochondrial, viral, some fault in the brain, environmental, immune, or some ghastly picture encompassing all of the above, it isn't helpful to have a psychiatrist dick around with the WHO definition of the problem such that it becomes defined narrowly as "psychiatric", which to most lay people - and most GPs - means "all in the mind".

The fact he then bandies words like "psychosomatic" around have done NOTHING to help anyone but himself.

That the condition may have its origin in the brain's failure to regulate certain autonomic systems, I neither mind nor have an opinion on - it's as likely as any other cause at this point. But bracketing ME in with depression/schizophrenia/eating disorders is just incorrect. It isn't a disorder that interferes with one's perception of reality. THAT is the point ME-ers take issue with.

[actually_not]

I take the point about the perception of reality...whatever reality may be. I agree the public/lay perception has not been aided by this man and I appreciate the anger towards him. (On a side note I'm a little bemused that other researchers get death threats for their research. Our retrovirus researcher here had some very unpleasant communications from the ME 'community'. Medical research is hard enough to initiate and fund these days and I can see why people are being deterred..but that's another matter).

But (and I'm not nagging) as a woman with a history of endo who is likely (by virtue of reasonable adipose stores) to be oestrogenised to some degree (via conversion of adrenal hormones) I would say it was worth getting the bladder/blood thing checked. We've seen a couple of bladder endos recently, unexpected in 'post-meno' women. Totally up to you though xx