Michael Sharpe: Mind, Medicine and Morals: A Tale of Two Illnesses (2019) BMJ blog - and published responses

Jonathan Edwards said:
This article by Greco does not seem to bear much relation to the original trailer. It seems to be an exercise in heavy duty, and probably turgid and vacuous, philosophising. I will have to try to read it later.
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Indeed..

Conclusion
In this paper I have articulated the problematic of psychosomatics through a number of propositions that reconnect it to the present and to contemporary concerns. In contrast to classic approaches to ‘psychosomatic problems’, which typically set out by denouncing the conceptual inadequacy of mind/body dualism, I proposed to begin by focusing on the resilience of dualism as an empirical datum deserving closer analysis.
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But since this article was not approached in a systematic and empirical manner, it could also be considered an exercise in confirmation bias. Reducing everything down to mind-body dualism when that might not have been the intended meaning in the various examples covered. There is often a separation in practise - because psychs specialise in understanding the mind, whereas physiologists focus on physiology, but this is a functional separation, rather than a philosophical division. Likewise, the divisions within biology are matters of scale, not philosophy.
 
The whole thing is meaningless. The author (Greco) has no understanding of the concepts she talks about. I suspect Michael Sharpe may have decided he did not want to be associated with it. The piece is absolutely without content. It is exactly like those robot driven paragraphs we looked at before. At least Sharpe has some sort of ice what he means, even if it is self-contradictory.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
So are we expecting something else from Greco and Sharpe? Maybe so. But I am losing track of the sequence here. If this is a full article in a special issue why is the other one not out?
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They seem to posting them as they're ready. The special issue of JHP did the same, more or less. The link is to the journal's "latest content"--the last 3-4 days they've all been about biopsychosocial and/or psychosomatics. So I assume the Sharpe/Greco opus will be coming in in next few days sometime...

https://mh.bmj.com/content/early/recent
 
OMG, I just looked at @dave30th's link: https://mh.bmj.com/content/early/recent.

Melancholy after infertility treatment and the role of art in stroke recovery are both really valuable things to study, imo. They are the reason we have the humanities.

The others sound like - and in fact are - complete utter tosh (I read them), and are the reason why the humanities get such a bad rap. If I had written either of the articles on stroke and infertility, I'd be really annoyed to be piled in with all this mental masturbation.
June 07, 2019
June 06, 2019
June 05, 2019
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Given this wider context, I almost think its not worth the trouble of replying.
 
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Barry said:
Still trying to get the science right I expect.

Still not long enough.
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If they live long enough, decades after we are all cured and no one contracts this disease anymore, they will still be trying to cherry-pick some psych correlation and promoting their belief system. It's a cult, reality simply does not factor in.
 
Snow Leopard said:
Perhaps patient response inspired some extra peer review?
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Of all places, this publication would be a pretty bad medium to just do the usual and dismiss all contradictory evidence and patient experience.

Not holding my breath, but this is one of those places where just taking Sharpe at his word will be really hard to justify in hindsight. Most of medicine happens without taking patients into account, it's a purely one-way street. Medical humanities is the exception, it would be pretty bad to swing and miss here. Sharpe did a pretty bad mistake not taking this into account. He's too much used to have his every word repeated uncritically.
 
rvallee said:
Medical humanities is the exception, it would be pretty bad to swing and miss here.
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Hm. Maybe what you are implying, in Dr Greco's terms, is that in a post-constructivist neomodern universe on amnipatetic terms, medical humanities has to be considered differentially, as an outrider to the broad swathe of intellectual canon, and as a consequence lifting the niblick in a malglenohumeral orientation while maintaining an orthostatic posture on various species of graminacae and failing to impact a subereous sphere according to prior intention would fall well below the normative considerations of academic discourse.

I doubt anyone would notice to be honest.
 
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