ME/CFS SKeptic: A new blog series on the dark history of psychosomatic medicine

Andy said:
The dark psychosomatic history of cancer part I

"Since ancient times, the onset of cancer has been linked to depression and melancholia. Hopelessness, despair, and sorrow were regularly mentioned as a trigger of cancer until modern research refuted such a connection.

In the second half of the 20th century, the idea of a cancer-prone personality became widespread in both the scientific and popular press. People who repressed their anger and emotions were said to be at higher risk of developing cancer. Behavioral therapy was proposed as a treatment and prophylaxis. Our investigation shows that some of the researchers who introduced these ideas were financially supported by the tobacco industry to turn attention away from causal links between smoking and cancer.

Another psychosomatic myth states that having a positive attitude or a “fighting spirit” leads to a better prognosis. The notion that patients could cure themselves of cancer if they had the right attitude or tried hard enough to overcome it, became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. These ideas were not supported by scientific evidence and led to stigma, guilt, and frustration.

As we will discover, the history of cancer has surprisingly many of these episodes. We will therefore divide it into three parts. Today, in part I, we look at the early history, from the ancient humors to wild psychoanalytic theories in the middle of the 20th century."

https://mecfsskeptic.com/the-dark-psychosomatic-history-of-cancer-part-i/
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Cancer is a great topic for this. I get the impression that here in Hungary BPS people focus way more on cancer than on us. They just published an onco-psychological guideline here, which I kind of skimmed through and realized that biopsychosocial is an outdated term now, instead it is now bio-psycho-social-spiritual (no kidding, this is how they call it throughout the guideline).

I also read an interview last year with these onco-psychologists (who were deeply into psychosomatic stuff) and there was some serious patient blaming there, disguised as empathy. Basically they implied that the patient contributed to the disease by being chronically stressed. And there was a lot of talk that psychologists are also important for recovery from cancer and that they have patients who say they wouldn't change a thing and would still happily get cancer in another life too because now they see their life differently and have learnt to focus on positive things. :grumpy:

I tried to read up on this cancer and chronic stress issue and my understanding is that the evidence for this connection is not particulary strong and may be even an indirect effect (stressed people may smoke or drink more, etc).
 
Wyva said:
Cancer is a great topic for this.
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We were a bit surprised that there was so much material for an illness as cancer. For many of the diseases that we looked into, psychosomatic theories were popular until the 1950s but then started to decline. With cancer, it almost seems like the other way around. A psychosomatic approach to cancer was a bit of a hype in the 1970s and 1980s while it was largely absent before the 1950s.
 
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Michiel Tack said:
We were a bit surprised that there was so much material for an illness as cancer. For many of the diseases that we looked into, psychosomatic theories were popular until the 1950s but then started to decline. With cancer, it almost seems like the other way around. A psychosomatic approach to cancer was a bit of a hype in the 1970s and 1980s while it was large absent before the 1950s.
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Maybe there are two opposing forces in play here? On the one hand the long-standing psychosomatic establishment ownership of some illnesses, and then maybe later the emergence of BPS zealots looking for new domains to invade? As they do to this day of course.
 
The dark psychosomatic history of cancer part II
In Part I, we saw how psychoanalytically oriented researchers speculated about an ‘Amazon complex’ and the excremental meaning of cancer. These papers were so absurd that, luckily, they had little influence. That cannot be said of the recurrent myth we are about to explore now. This is the second key idea that keeps returning in the psychosomatic literature of cancer: the view that people who repress their anger and emotions are more likely to develop cancer.

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Full text at: https://mecfsskeptic.com/the-dark-psychosomatic-history-of-cancer-part-ii/
 
It's obvious from this that medical secrecy is widely abused to produce and promote specific outcomes. There should not be a need to wait a decade or more to replicate a fraudulent study, it should be possible to investigate its full raw data and work backward to establish that it is meaningless, but privacy concerns are used to shield from accountability. We see the same with most psychosocial studies, the flaws are obvious but hidden behind secrecy.

There are many reasons for those privacy rules, but the massive abuse that has been going on makes it clear there has to be changes to how it's done. Otherwise we get stuck with the endless cycle of "my trial may have been fraudulent but you're going to have to do your own large trial to prove it". Which is exactly where we are.

Lack of accountability always leads to failure and medicine is not some special snowflake. If anything in dealing with the highest possible stakes, it should be more accountable than normal, where we find it isn't at all. And this has a long tail, if someone can swallow the nonsense that a positive attitude can cure cancer, imagine what it can do for a little tiredness.
 
Just a side note: Hans Selye, the father of the stress theory (general adaptation syndrome), and taken up by psychosomatics, also seems to have been funded by the tobacco industry :

" Selye died on 16 October 1982, in Montreal at the age of 75. Sadly, a scandal emerged after his death: he was said to have received extensive funding for his research from the tobacco industry, for which he had worked as a consultant over several decades, as well as participating in its pro-smoking campaigns. "
(again to blur the link between cancer and tobacco, I suppose)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5915631/ (at the end of the article)

Psychosomatics and cancer is truly a dark story...some patients even died, completely indoctrinated by these falsehoods. Until the end, for exemple, they hoped to resolve a "psychological conflict" which they believed to be the source of their cancer. It's horrible. And what about " toxic " positive thinking, which can prevent the person from having frank discussions with loved ones or preparing for death, since this is associated with the "negative". Avoid difficult but sometimes necessary topics, the mantra being to stay positive at all costs.

Excellent articles, thank you @Michiel Tack.
 
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Lilas said:
Psychosomatics and cancer is truly a dark story...some patients even died, completely indoctrinated by these falsehoods.
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And it continues. Cancer patients continue to die, convinced that what they really need to do to get better is to reform their personality. I know of one person in my extended family, a mother of 5 boys, who eschewed biological therapies for her cancer in favour of therapy to fix the flaws in her personality that had caused the cancer - and died rather rapidly.
 
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I know @Hutan, it is sometimes very sad and dramatic. I have already witnessed this in my work as well as seen testimonies from relatives and professionals in journalistic reports or investigations on TV. We live in a world where many people adhere to parallel realities. Our contemporaries laugh at the Middle Ages as an era full of superstitions and lacking in rationality, while our era is full of alternative facts, beliefs and ideologies of all kinds... not so different, only the form changes.
 
The remarkable testimony of Richard Renneker
In previous blog posts, we took a deep dive into the problematic psychosomatic literature on cancer. In the 1950s, psychoanalytic researchers argued that people developed cancer because they repressed their emotions or, in the case of women with breast cancer, because they rejected the feminine role. One of the psychiatrists involved, Dr. Richard Renneker, wrote a revealing testimony in 1957. It provides a rare glimpse behind the scenes of psychosomatic research.

“We were biased researchers”, Renneker wrote. “Biased in the sense that we believed, on the basis of our preliminary study of cancer of the breast, that there was a psychological trigger factor in some cases. Our disregard of cancer knowledge was appalling…” In this blog post, we take a closer look at Renneker’s remarkable paper.

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https://mecfsskeptic.com/the-remarkable-testimony-of-richard-renneker/
 
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Such an important Blog series, illustrating how widespread and dangerous assumptions of psychogenic causes for so many illnesses have been and still are.

@Michiel Tack, thank you to you both for putting all this work together; is their anything we can do to help disseminate this more widely? Though sites like this help share it amongst the ME community, we are not really the people that most desperately need to read it.
 
Peter Trewhitt said:
@Michiel Tack, thank you to you both for putting all this work together; is their anything we can do to help disseminate this more widely? Though sites like this help share it amongst the ME community, we are not really the people that most desperately need to read it.
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There are still a lot of these stories that we need to look at it, like ulcers and stress, type A and heart disease, ulcerative colitis, skin disease etc. So I think we first will try to keep going and only afterwards we might see if more can be done to spread the message more widely.
 
Lilas said:
Hans Selye, the father of the stress theory (general adaptation syndrome), and taken up by psychosomatics, also seems to have been funded by the tobacco industry :
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Yes, Seyle and stress might be another episode to focus a blog post on.

He wrote the following review on the cover of the book getting well again by Carl Simonton.
upload_2022-3-10_14-47-38.png

There are other pioneers of 'psychoneuroimmunology' who show up in internal tobacco documents and seem to have received funding like Marvin Stein en Robert Ader.
 
Michiel Tack said:
The remarkable testimony of Richard Renneker

https://mecfsskeptic.com/the-remarkable-testimony-of-richard-renneker/
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Six percent is a very low response rate, and it seems that this frustrated the researchers. “…the difficulty in finding patients who would agree to psychotherapy”, they wrote, “suggests that the most masochistic women were excluded as they preferred to keep their neurotic problems.”
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Talk about self-reinforcing prejudice and bias :eek:.

It really feels like there should be some sort of legal protection against harmful sh1t like this.

Saw this quote the other day that seems to have relevance:

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The sad fact is that the people who promote these sorts of ideas aren't very very stupid. If they were very very stupid, they wouldn't be such a problem.

They are just rather susceptible to normal human desires to feel superior to others, and to feel that they are protected against the misfortunes that strike inferior people.
 
When I was first diagnosed in the early 1990s, a psychologist told me I have a type A personality and that's why I had "cfs".

Type A people as the ME/CFS Skeptic article says, are ambitious, aggressive and very competitive.

This therapist diagnosed me as Type A, just a short while into our first or second session. I went to that therapist for help, and much of what I got was criticism, dismissal, and a poor assessment of my personality. A cookie-cutter approach. I am motivated, and sometimes competitive, but not aggressive.

It's interesting that some psychs blamed pwME for having Type A personalities, which includes being ambitious (motivated). And, other psychs blamed pwME for not being motivated. Hhhmmmm..... the twists and turns with their belief systems!
 
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