morphism
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it becomes more plausible to me that there is an underlying emotional component that is either modulating the symptoms, or leading to some of them.
I'm afraid, but this is a logical non-sequitur.
- The "weirdness" of a physical symptom does not logically imply that it has an emotional cause. Counterexample: People with rabies panic when presented with liquids to drink. I would say that this symptom qualifies as "weird" — unfortunately, the disease is still deadly virtually all of the time.
- Even if the symptom is an emotion, such as irrational fear, this does not imply that the cause is emotional. Counterexample: 1) Rabies as above, 2) Depression can be caused by continued ingestion of fructose during fructose malabsorption.
Even more afraidly, I have to point out that current notions of an "emotional cause" have no basis in science — even though there are codified in popular diagnoses, such as F45 ("somatform disorder") in ICD-10.
Specifically, the problem with F45 is the following:
F45 postulates that the inability to detect a physical cause implies the presence of an emotional cause.
But "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". As Ioper already points out, the physical cause may be unknown and a) there exists no current test for it. In practice, b) the doctor is "too lazy" to test for it.
In fact, the postulated criterion for presence of "emotional cause" is unscientific — by definition, a criterion which is scientific must be falsifiable. Here, this means that there must exist an experiment which is able to reject the hypothesis that XY is the "emotional cause". No such experiment has ever been put forward for F45. (If you know of any such experiment, please do write a reply to this post.)
As for your "weird" symptoms: Mast cell diseases, such as mastocytosis, MCAD or hereditary alpha tryptasemia are known to cause "weird" symptoms.
(This fact is useful, but strictly speaking unnecessary for rejecting F45.)
This is actually intended by the Federal Reserve — the typical inflation target is 2%. The reasoning behind this is that money is only useful if it is spent for goods and services — people who make the goods and perform the services will only do so if there is demand for it, and the inflation gives a little nudge to spend money rather than hoard it. Put differently, spending money is equivalent to soliciting work from other people. No spending, no working.
As a counterpoint, the creators of cryptocurrencies typically think that this is a terrible line of reasoning, and therefore created their own money.
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