1. Sign our petition calling on Cochrane to withdraw their review of Exercise Therapy for CFS here.
    Dismiss Notice
  2. Guest, the 'News in Brief' for the week beginning 18th March 2024 is here.
    Dismiss Notice
  3. Welcome! To read the Core Purpose and Values of our forum, click here.
    Dismiss Notice

From illness perceptions to illness reality? Perceived consequences and emotional representations ... in p/with vertigo & dizziness, 2020, Wolf et al

Discussion in 'Other psychosomatic news and research' started by Andy, Jan 25, 2020.

  1. Andy

    Andy Committee Member

    Messages:
    21,814
    Location:
    Hampshire, UK
    Full title: From illness perceptions to illness reality? Perceived consequences and emotional representations relate to handicap in patients with vertigo and dizziness
    Paywall, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022399919307834
    Sci hub, https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2020.109934
     
  2. chrisb

    chrisb Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    4,602
    Perhaps we need to start counting the number of different usages of the term "perceptions", and then analysing them.

    Is a "perceived consequence" a "perception"?
     
  3. Snow Leopard

    Snow Leopard Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    3,823
    Location:
    Australia
    Perhaps the handicap comes first and the illness perceptions come second... :rolleyes:
     
  4. Forbin

    Forbin Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    1,581
    Location:
    USA
    Perhaps I'm misunderstanding this, but it almost sounds like they're suggesting that if patients would only "lighten up" about consequences of dizziness and vertigo then they wouldn't be so handicapped.

    I'm perfectly willing to let any interested investigators test this theory by riding along with me on as I drive on treacherous, winding mountain roads while listening to some old Steve Martin records.
     
    Joh, Mij, 2kidswithME and 8 others like this.
  5. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    12,299
    Location:
    Canada
    Problem is that almost all of that perception comes from people who are not experiencing the illness in the first place and clearly have a very poor understanding of the impact. It's a distortion of reality, complexity compressed to oversimplistic carricatures invented to fit expectations.

    Actually this is relatively easy to test, as vertigo and dizziness can be induced. Let's have the researchers experience them chronically and see how their perception changes. No takers? Figures.

    False attribution error syndrome, yet again. This is straight in line with "the only poverty is in the mind", that the perception of being poor is somehow more significant than the actual impact of being poor. Something only a person who has never experienced it would ever think.

    Where medicine cannot measure things, frankly things are about exactly as poor as they were a full century ago. Zero significant progress, just embarrassing.
     
  6. Hoopoe

    Hoopoe Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    5,234
    Unless I'm misunderstanding something, illness consequences is conceptually very similar to handicap. Two terms for similar things. Unsurprisingly, the closer two things are conceptually, the more tightly they will correlate, or "predict" each other.
     
  7. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    12,299
    Location:
    Canada
    Ironically enough, this is, yet again, strong evidence that people suffering from chronic illness are generally reliable witnesses to our life experience and actually pretty good at predicting progression and assessing our limits. For roughly the same reasons that asking someone if they can jump 6m in the air, they will say no. Not because they don't want to but because no human has ever done that and we generally know what we are capable of, give or take a few exceptions.

    You know, the exact opposite of the current illness model. It would actually be interesting to specifically research this, it only ever has in the wrong direction, which is the only reason this is believed in the first place. The entire paradigm is built on the idea that this perception is itself the illness, when it's actually evidence of the opposite.
     
  8. James Morris-Lent

    James Morris-Lent Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    903
    Location:
    United States
    It looks to me like they are abusing the fact that 'predict' and 'explain' mean something different in statistical models versus typical communication. Very shabby.

    Clearly this being a cross-sectional study, there is no 'prediction' or 'explanation'/causality in the non-statistical sense. However, when I read the following:
    ... I find it difficult to think that they would not like you to interpret those words in the typical rather than statistical sense.


    They seem to acknowledge their equivocation here:
    In which case one wonders, why talk a whole bunch of crap in the first place.


    Statistics has been stuck with some rather unfortunate word choices, 'significant' being the other best example I can think of. However it should not be that hard for research scientists to navigate this and make their meaning clear. (Or for reviewers and editors to identify and call out such misleading language.)
     
    Mij, Invisible Woman, rvallee and 6 others like this.
  9. Milo

    Milo Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    2,107
    You can’t explain stupid. It happens. Obviously these researchers need a good dose of reality and go on to get vertigo themselves. And taste their own medicine to see what stupid tastes like.
     
  10. Forbin

    Forbin Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    1,581
    Location:
    USA
    Yeah, I'm not sure how you can tell if a "patient's cognitive and emotional concepts" of their dizziness and vertigo are inappropriately impacting their degree of handicap - unless you had experienced similar symptoms over a similar duration - and how would you know if the severity of symptoms was equivalent?

    I'm reminded of the Native American proverb "Help me never to judge another until I have walked in his moccasins," and Shakespeare's "There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently."

    [Also, note to self: Remember to never tell the doctor that your "VD" is flaring up. ]
     
    Last edited: Jan 26, 2020
    Mij, Invisible Woman, rvallee and 3 others like this.
  11. Mithriel

    Mithriel Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    2,815
    Yes, I did find it strange that they talk about perceptions and then continually use the term VD. Has it been long enough that the public don't think VD means venereal disease any more after decades when it did?

    It makes me think they don't know much.
     
  12. Snow Leopard

    Snow Leopard Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    3,823
    Location:
    Australia
    The authors are German, VD never referred to venereal disease in their country. Instead they call them geschlechtskrankheit, which just rolls off the tongue!
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2020
    Joh, Invisible Woman, Forbin and 3 others like this.
  13. Forbin

    Forbin Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    1,581
    Location:
    USA

Share This Page