Rant Conspiracy theories/ Crazy thoughts -- Post your whackiest beliefs in here that no one agrees with WITHOUT REGRETS!

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pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
13,237
8,169
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[DHT]Osiris said:
Now you're mixing things up, those in power don't give two shits about how anyone in the working class is treated because the whole point is to perpetuate inter-class warfare to avoid anyone looking upward. Class warfare is the only warfare. Everything else is a distraction.
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And in this class war, which side are the professional-managerial class on?
 
feralkid

feralkid

Lifer
Jan 28, 2002
16,577
4,657
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pmv said:
The entire discipline of psychiatry/clinical psychology is largely a fraud, in my opinion. It's the means by which mysticism and a belief in magic has been smuggled back into our supposedly 'scientific' worldview.

I remember the last time a psychiatrist pushed SSRIs at me for my 'medically unexplained symptoms'. When I was reluctant to take them (having had every variety of SSRI they have over the last few decades, with no positive effects from any of them) they told me I should "try to believe in them, they work better if you believe in them".

Not sure what else you call that but faith healing? (I took them, and all they did was make me twitch uncontrollably. They did nothing for the physical symptoms they were prescribed for - I guess I lacked sufficient faith?)

And then there's the favorite mental health mantra of "the patient has to _want_ to get better" - the all-purpose excuse for failed treatments. If a psychological treatment doesn't work, it's always because the patient lacked sufficient belief in it. It appears to me that clinical psychology thus shares the non-falsifiability that is characteristic of faith healing and other assorted woo.

On top of that, there's the official line of the psychiatric profession on 'medically unexplained symptoms', which is pure God-of-the-Gaps reasoning (to whit: any physical symptom science can't currently explain, must be due to the sufferer's "wrong thoughts", which are to be corrected by means of CBT).

All that does is substitute 'the mind' in the place where the medieval Catholic church would have put 'God' or 'Satan's invisible demons' (with CBT as the replacement for exorcism or 'accepting Jesus into your heart').

Heck, the mental health industry even gets royal patronage, much as the Christian church did. It even features outright criminal abusers, much like the Catholic clergy (I encountered one such personally, and have heard of other cases).

I don't understand how people can see this dogma as anything other than a religious one. There's nothing remotely scientific about it.
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"I had some shitty Docs, so fuck the whole bunch."

A truly rational conclusion.

That's some serious MAGA-grade science denial.

Woah, daddy.
 
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P

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
13,237
8,169
136
feralkid said:
"I had some shitty Docs, so fuck the whole bunch."

A truly rational conclusion.

That's some serious MAGA-grade science denial.

Woah, daddy.
Click to expand...

Science? You really think the collective track record of that profession merits the word 'science'?

Do you give similar respect to the Catholic church?
 
P

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
13,237
8,169
136
feralkid said:
"I had some shitty Docs, so fuck the whole bunch."

A truly rational conclusion.

That's some serious MAGA-grade science denial.

Woah, daddy.
Click to expand...

I guess a lot of fake-left liberals are pretty right-wing at heart. Always respect power and authority, eh?
 
hal2kilo

hal2kilo

Lifer
Feb 24, 2009
23,617
10,490
136
nakedfrog said:
You're likely familiar with the placebo effect. How about the nocebo effect?

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The nocebo effect of drugs

While the placebo effect has been studied for a long time, much less is known about its negative counterpart, named the nocebo effect. However, it may be of particular importance because of its impact on the treatment outcomes and public health. We conducted ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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Placebo effect is the only real response I ever had from an SSRI, I took 3 different ones for months/years at a time. The samples ones that did not have a placebo effect made me manic, and we toss into the bin. Won't touch that crap anymore. Oh, yea, most prescribed by doctors that were not qualified, i.e. GPs.
 
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Indus

Indus

Lifer
May 11, 2002
10,263
6,920
136
apnews.com

Judge says South Carolina can enforce 6-week abortion ban amid dispute over when a heartbeat begins

A state judge has ruled that South Carolina can continue to enforce a ban on nearly all abortions around six weeks after conception as an appeal continues on what exactly defines a heartbeat under the law.
apnews.com apnews.com

apnews.com

Ohio voters approved reproductive rights. Will the state's near-ban on abortion stand?

The 2019 law under consideration by Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Christian Jenkins bans most abortions once cardiac activity can be detected, which can be as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women are aware.
apnews.com apnews.com

Never thought I'd agree with the term "activist judges" but maybe there is more to it than just a terminology.
 
P

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
13,237
8,169
136
[DHT]Osiris said:
Alright, I'll rephrase: zero evidence of any physical cause. If all elements of a person's abdomen are physiologically normal, and insofar as we can determine their nervous system is functioning normally, we have to presume the mind is triggering pain receptors when it shouldn't. This is thoroughly documented in the scope of 'Somatic Symptom Disorder' and is completely manageable as a psychological condition. That is not to say that every instance if 'we dunno' is psychological, but some are, and it's far more common and likely than 'exceedingly rare diseases 1, 7, and 13' (occam's razor and all that).
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But how can you tell if "all elements" are "functioning normal", given the limited capacity of current medical knowledge and technology to understand and examine the human body? This isn't Star Trek.

It's akin to the flaw often pointed out in that Sherlock Holmes line about "once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". The problem being that you can never fully 'eliminate the impossible', because of Rumsfeld's "Unknown Unknowns" - the things you don't know that you don't know (can't believe I'm quoting Donald Rumsfeld, but that bit was correct). It's the fundamental flaw with all such "diagnoses of exclusion" (otherwise known as "god-of-the-gaps", and beloved by religious apologists everywhere)

That's why, for 35 years, doctors kept telling me there was 'nothing physically wrong' and therefore all my symptoms had to be 'psychological'. And ignored my point that just because they couldn't find what was physically wrong, didn't mean there wasn't anything to find, because they were limited in what their technology would let them see.

Then the NHS finally got a lot of shiny new CT scanners and MRI machines in, and I got a scan out of them, and the message suddenly changed (literally overnight) to 'you need immediate brain surgery'. Because I in fact had a 'rare disease' (rare diseases are in reality, when considered in aggregate, quite common).
 
D

[DHT]Osiris

Lifer
Dec 15, 2015
14,422
12,563
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pmv said:
But how can you tell if "all elements" are "functioning normal", given the limited capacity of current medical knowledge and technology to understand and examine the human body? This isn't Star Trek.

It's akin to the flaw often pointed out in that Sherlock Holmes line about "once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". The problem being that you can never fully 'eliminate the impossible', because of Rumsfeld's "Unknown Unknowns" - the things you don't know that you don't know (can't believe I'm quoting Donald Rumsfeld, but that bit was correct). It's the fundamental flaw with all such "diagnoses of exclusion" (otherwise known as "god-of-the-gaps", and beloved by religious apologists everywhere)

That's why, for 35 years, doctors kept telling me there was 'nothing physically wrong' and therefore all my symptoms had to be 'psychological'. And ignored my point that just because they couldn't find what was physically wrong, didn't mean there wasn't anything to find, because they were limited in what their technology would let them see.

Then the NHS finally got a lot of shiny new CT scanners and MRI machines in, and I got a scan out of them, and the message suddenly changed (literally overnight) to 'you need immediate brain surgery'. Because I in fact had a 'rare disease' (rare diseases are in reality, when considered in aggregate, quite common).
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Occam's razor, is it more likely that a given person has an extremely rare, near-impossible to diagnose condition that we have limited medical knowledge of, or is it that the mind is generating the signals unprompted?

Yes it's unfortunate that we don't know everything there is to know about the body, especially the brain. We've got a whole lot of knowledge on most of the body though, and we can pretty well tell if a kidney, liver, or heart are working correctly.
 
P

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
13,237
8,169
136
[DHT]Osiris said:
Occam's razor, is it more likely that a given person has an extremely rare, near-impossible to diagnose condition that we have limited medical knowledge of, or is it that the mind is generating the signals unprompted?
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The former certainly seems to happen more often (as I say 'extremely rare' conditions are fairly common - I have at least three myself - albeit two of them are causally-related so not independent - and have known many people with such conditions).

There's a fair number of now-acknowledged physical conditions that were once considered to be 'psychological' (and before that, due to 'demonic possession'). Seems that a proportion of sufferers of MS, for example, were once misdiagnosed with 'hysteria'.

I haven't seen any conclusive evidence for the latter idea ("the mind is generating the signals unprompted" - have these signals been detected and the mechanism by which they are generated been understood?).

So Occam's Razor (insofar as it applies at all, and I'm not sure it does in a situation where both alternatives are ill-defined and full of unknowns) would seem to favour the former explanation.
 
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pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
13,237
8,169
136
I mean "Occams Razor" seems quite a limited tool, to me.

Would you argue that it means drug-addiction should be blamed on "Satan" rather than a long and complex chain of interacting influences involving social conditions, an individual's contigent life history and their brain structure stemming from genetics? After all, just blaming "Satan" only involves one factor, so it's simpler?
 
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[DHT]Osiris

Lifer
Dec 15, 2015
14,422
12,563
146
pmv said:
I mean "Occams Razor" seems quite a limited tool, to me.

Would you argue that it means drug-addiction should be blamed on "Satan" rather than a long and complex chain of interacting influences involving social conditions, an individual's contigent life history and their brain structure stemming from genetics? After all, just blaming "Satan" only involves one factor, so it's simpler?
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Well, yeah, but psychological conditions aren't 'satan'. I'm not externalizing the problem, I'm stating there's a cause internal to the body. If you prefer, there is a 'physical cause', it's just neurological rather than lymphatic, gastroenterological, etc.
 
P

pmv

Lifer
May 30, 2008
13,237
8,169
136
[DHT]Osiris said:
Well, yeah, but psychological conditions aren't 'satan'. I'm not externalizing the problem, I'm stating there's a cause internal to the body. If you prefer, there is a 'physical cause', it's just neurological rather than lymphatic, gastroenterological, etc.
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But my symptoms did indeed turn out to have a neurological cause. That's not the same as a psychiatric/psychological cause. The required treatment wasn't talking therapy but brain surgery.

The fundamental problem seems to me (and I know I'm no expert on philosophy) to be that we are no nearer understanding the relation between mind and brain, thoughts and matter, than we were in DesCartes' time.
 
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[DHT]Osiris

Lifer
Dec 15, 2015
14,422
12,563
146
pmv said:
But my symptoms did indeed turn out to have a neurological cause. That's not the same as a psychiatric/psychological cause. The required treatment wasn't talking therapy but brain surgery.

The fundamental problem seems to me (and I know I'm no expert on philosophy) to be that we are no nearer understanding the relation between mind and brain, thoughts and matter, than we were in DesCartes' time.
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And I'm glad your situation had an actual, physical cause that could be dealt with. There's a good chance that most psychological conditions have actual, physical causes, even if it's a peculiarity with wiring, genetic, whatever, and that one day we will be able to deal with it directly. In the interim, our treatment paths range from 'do nothing, life will suck for you' to 'therapy, conditioning' to 'pharmacological/surgery intervention'. I don't see a direct barrier between physical neurological conditions and nonphysical ones, but that doesn't mean that some cannot be remediated without a knife or a pill.
 
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