On Psychosomatic Illness

I don't know anything about Fibromyalgia, yet I wince when someone says it's psychosomatic. I wonder about almost any conditioned considered psychosomatic now.

I realize I'm using the term in the vernacular to mean "it's all in your head". That's how it is largely understood even though, technically, psychosomatic illness can refer to anything without a medical explanation. People communicating with the public have to understand the common usage of the term as it's being heard.

Jane Brody wrote about the concern with this label almost a decade ago (in full at the very bottom):

"When I was given a diagnosis of breast cancer in February 1999, many friends and readers wondered: 'Why did you get breast cancer? You take such good care of yourself!' . . . It seems that many people believe that if you do everything 'right', bad things won't happen. But bad things can and do happen. And they happen to the 'best' and the 'worst' of us. . . . If you're blessed with good health, you can say, 'I did it.' But if you lose your health, you know that external forces beyond your control can get in your way. Healthy people tend to act as if beneath every sick person is a healthy person trying to come out. . . . 

Wasn't it Susan Sontag who pointed out that whenever the cause of an illness is mysterious, it's assumed to come from psychological problems or a moral weakness? And once science finally figures out the medical root of the illness, that assumption disappears. Will we one day have a better -- that is, more scientific -- understanding of ailments like chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, Gulf War syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivities or any of the other current 'wastebasket' diagnoses that many medical and lay people consider psychosomatic? 

Covid is Weakening Us as a Species

Yesterday I wrote about the probability of Long Covid sweeping through our civilization over the next five years. This post looks at how it presents in individuals: 

Infections rates are extremely high right now, and we not masking or ensuring there's clean air in hospitals, stores, or public transportation, and we're still actively preventing teachers and parents from taking measures to clean the air in their classrooms because so many people think it's just like a cold. It's really not. Here's just a few testimonies of life with Long Covid:

The Odds are Not EVER in Our Favour!

You either control a pandemic, or you let it control you. - Professor John Edmunds.

The CDC's estimate that 20% of infections will become Long Covid. 

Let's do some math!! If we take the lowest numbers out there, if just 10% of Covid infections become Long Covid, and almost everyone gets infected yearly since 2022, then in just 5 years, by 2028, half the population will have Long Covid, right?? 

Consider that Long Covid shows up in a variety of ways, sometimes like Alzheimers, sometimes ME/CFS, and many people can barely sit up in bed for 15 minutes at a time. Check out the documentary Unrest to get the picture. How will the schools (and all businesses and government and just about everyone) cope with THAT?? Who, in your life, will take care of you if you can't get out of bed or feed yourself? And who will take care of both of you if you both get it?

We are ALL the Immunocompromised!

Since Covid affects the immune system, everyone who has ever had it has a significant change of being immunocompromised now! 

Dr. Gary Payinda noticed,

"Some viruses, which used to cause barely a sniffle in healthy adults, were now putting people in hospital. We're now seeing your typical regular healthy middle-aged person presenting to the emergency department with bad cases of RSV, and that's pretty novel for us."  

A paper published in July looked at how Covid causes immune dysfunction, and raised this concern:

"The oncoming burden of Long Covid faced by patients, health-care providers, governments and economies is so large as to be unfathomable, which is possibly why minimal high-level planning is currently allocated to it." 

On Teaching Public Health

Organizations have done such a bad job of explaining Covid to the public over the last almost four years, that it will be difficult to ever get mitigations back in place. 

Research director with a PhD in education, Dr. Sean Mullen said incredulously, 

"They said herd immunity would work. Then hybrid immunity. What's next? They should just come out and say it: Hocus-Pocus, Hail Mary Hypothetical Immunity. Seems we've been banking on magical thinking, prayers, and theories rather than results. Hallucination immunity. Might as well be dreaming."

When asked why health care professionals aren't masking he explained why he thinks people in general stopped:

Children Risk More Illnesses after Covid

What every pediatrician in the world needs to read - from tern: 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a really bad thing, isn't it?

I wonder what the percentage is after the 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 12th infection?

Here's a really really interesting point in the study: Only a tiny proportion of the kids have a constellation of problems.  The new issues are spread out across all the body's systems: 

"Only 2% of children had two disorders at the same time."

Do you understand the significance of that?

Covid on the Brain

Listen to me try to say all these big words in an 8 minute recording:

It's curious how many are completely unaware that Covid is a brain-invasive disease. It's the biggest reason I have to continue keeping the virus out of my body. It's not like a cold or flu that you catch and then recover from. It has staying power. 

I first read about Covid's affect on the brain in National Geographic back in December 2021, when they wrote about how it affects personality, and I wrote about it the following January. One person was "confused, hesitant, nearly catatonic," another "developed impulsive or irrational behaviour," and others "arrived at the hospital with severe depression, hallucinations, or paranoia." The article reports, 

"Now, almost two years into the pandemic, it's become clear that neurological problems from Covid-19 can linger or intensify. After recovering from the virus, an alarming number of patients remain shrouded in brain fog, suffering from anxiety or depression, unable to think straight or hold on to memories, and fumbling for words. . . . A study of 395 people who were hospitalized with Covid-19 found that 91% had cognitive issues, fatigue, depression, anxiety, sleep problems, or struggled with routine activities six months after they returned home."

Remember, that was in 2021.

Maté: Part Depth Psychology, but Part Questionable Quick Fix

He received the Order of Canada, profoundly helped many people with addiction on the streets of Vancouver, and is much loved and admired, but some of Dr. Gabor Maté's claims feel like they don't hold water. And some claims might actually be dangerous if blindly accepted.

I've encountered Maté in a few courses I'm taking, and have been strongly encouraged to watch his newest film and read his book several times now; I opted for the former. One follower was excited to tell me, with great confidence, that ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) is caused by a specific trauma and that everyone is carrying unresolved trauma which, if resolved, can heal physical ailments like cancer. Okay. I have some reservations that I've kept to myself until seeing so many in academia wholeheartedly promoting some poorly substantiated claims.

While Maté has some excellent techniques in the work he does, the way he presents and explains the material provokes me to look up research studies to try to corroborate many of his ideas.

I gobbled up his books twenty years ago, and there are some useful analogies and treatments in there, but even then there were parts that gave me pause.

A Microcosm of Arguments

This thread of comments of how Covid is affecting younger people encapsulates many of the attitudes affecting the people most affected - and general ableism. I used pseudonyms, and I'm not linking because it might not be the thing they want to be known for. It was Elsie's thread, so responses were to her.

Teen: "Why don't more people talk about what the Covid lockdowns did to young people like me? At 15 years old, I was involuntarily isolated from my friends for SIX MONTHS. I didn't see them, I didn't meet them. The lockdown RUINED young people like me. An entire Generation."

Elsie: "Okay, so I was 19 when the pandemic started. I caught covid in March 2020, before lockdown, and never recovered. Now I can't work, can't leave the house, and I've had no friend for 3 years. So which is worse? A few months of lockdown or a lifetime of isolation?"

Mom: "My daughter spent a year and a half doing virtual school. Lost out on a lot of dreams she'd worked hard for (National competitions etc). I'm immune compromised, and me dying would be worse, but do NOT diminish the impact of isolation on many teenagers." 

Elsie: "I was also a teenager! What about my dreams? Or do they not count. I might never live independently, never have a job, never get married or have children. Why are my dreams worth less?"

Mom: "Why are you hosting the Suffering Olympics? It's quite unnecessary."

Covid's Effects on Lymphocytes

A bit more on Cov-AIDS from Daniel Brittain Dugger because people need to be aware of the similarities between these diseases to, just maybe, provoke them to do everything they can to reduce transmission: mask, vax, and ventilate and clean the air. 

Long story short, Covid affects your immune system, making anyone who gets it open to getting all sorts of other things that their body would normally protect them from. The fewer times you get an infection, and the lower the dose of infection, the better off you'll be. DBD is arguing against the use of Paxlovid. Elsewhere he notes that those on HIV PrEP have the lowest rate of SARS-CoV-2 acquisition. It's just an argument being presented here, and I'm not an expert on it, so talk to your doctor if Paxlovid is right for you! This is a very complex one, so I explained some of the terms along the way. 

From October 2020

"As a member of the HIV community, who has endeavored to not only educate themselves about their own condition but that of a chronic SARS-CoV-2 infection, it troubles me that there is a population in decline that does not receive the attention it deserves: that of the CD4 lymphocyte."

ME/CFS as a Guide to Long Covid

ME stands for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, a chronic neurological disease affecting the nervous and immune systems of about 17 million people worldwide. It's also known as CFS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, for it's most obvious symptom: confining people to their bed with overwhelming fatigue. Any activity, physical or mental, can make things worse from PEM, post-exertional malaise. But that's not the only symptom. People also experience debilitating pain triggered by exertion as well as any otherwise minor illness. Anyone can get ME, but it primarily hits people between 40 and 65.

Kornelia Paulsen illustrates it like this:

The disorder has been around for decades, but doctors and researchers still don't know how to help, and some regard patients with contempt or give bad advice like, just get some rest or muscle through it or lose some weight or take antidepressants or anti-anxiety meds to help cope with chronic pain. In a nutshell, we're stuck at pull yerself up by yer bootstraps and it's all in yer head. The most damaging advice is the current cure-all: exercise - despite that it so clearly exacerbates symptoms. If exercise is going to be treated as medicine, then it needs to be studied like one and distributed with careful dosing as required, overtly discussing concerns with overdosing and other negative side effects.