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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33461 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I've personally never encountered a patient with fibromyalgia, and the very disease isn't a thing in India from what I can ascertain! I looked up the topic here, and barring a few niche websites or news blogs, awareness of the disease seems little to none.

I am willing to grant that psychosomatic pain is real and debilitating, but here, it mostly manifests as stomach issues, though I have seen chronic neuropathic pain of other natures too.

If it worked for you, that's really good! Medicine isn't so well-grounded that we don't have treatments that work despite not having a robust theoretical footing, if I had to embrace such high standards I couldn't aim to be a shrink ;)

My issue with Sarno is that he seems to blanket a variety of diseases that we do understand the etiology of, and issues with correlation and causation, though after the information others presented I'm more open to the idea being investigated.

I'm tempted to think he's intentionally acting out a Noble Lie, as he is caught in a bit of a double bind. On the one hand he needs people to confidently believe his diagnosis, but on the other hand he doesn't have excellent scientific data. So he may be fudging the facts a bit to make it more convincing to patients. I plan to do a follow up post on this if I get the time.

Well yes, that’s the point of a noble lie. It’s in the name - the intellegent elite lie to the public for their own good.

With modern liberal values that’s generally considered immoral, but in the case of psychosomatic pain I can see how it would be useful. A key part of the ‘cure’ is to convince people they aren’t in pain. Using a fake scientific method to give them confidence may be dishonest, but with the amount of people Sarno has helped I can see how he could justify it.

Yep, that’s modern or pre-modern, depending on which historian you ask. Currently we’re firmly in postmodernity.

Sure I’d agree with that. I think the line between science and pseudoscience is often blurred, however.

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