News article - The crippling brain condition doctors say is all in your mind

Daily Mail article about a girl - “ diagnosed with functional neurological disorder, or FND. It affects the central nervous system – and, for decades, has been dismissed by doctors as being ‘all in the mind’. And that leaves FND patients’ fighting to be taken seriously, in a similar way to those with chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME.

This is also thought to be a fault with the central nervous system, and affects 250,000 Britons. ME causes physical and mental fatigue as well as painful limbs, loss of concentration and digestive issues.

Distressingly, as no physical cause can be found, ME was commonly misdiagnosed, often as depression, stress or another mental health problem, as symptoms can seem similar.

Now, leading experts have dubbed FND ‘the new ME’ and warn that, for similar reasons, thousands of Britons may not be receiving appropriate treatment.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/...ft-18-kayaking-world-champion-wheelchair.html

 

Hysteria by any other name...

 

Which is psychotherapy - not at all like the sort of treatment used for depression or stress or another mental health problem. Yes, I see.

 

Some predicted that functional neurological disorder would be promoted as replacement for ME.

Presumably they would stop diagnosing ME and instead prefer to give a FND diagnosis, so that patients can continue to be given CBT. Until the FND patients revolt much in the same way we did.

 

Already being done - a few FND with CF being diagnosed in Lothian ( the land of John Stone)

 

Its not about i don't know
Its about i think its this reality denying house of cards that i choose to believe over people or facts.

 

Wessely et al 2012:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1117440247615361024


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3277687/


Stone & Sharpe et al 2005:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1117437156199469057


https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/76/suppl_1/i2

 

Just some cherry-picking from the Stone/ Sharpe/ Carson paper (2005):

Collapsing weakness

midline splitting

Movement disorder

Dizziness

Speech and swallowing symptoms

Visual symptoms

Investigations

CONCLUSIONS: ASSESSMENT AND DIAGNOSIS

edited to add: see also https://www.s4me.info/threads/myste...-health-new-scientist.8932/page-2#post-160325

https://www.s4me.info/threads/myste...-health-new-scientist.8932/page-2#post-160380

https://www.s4me.info/threads/chara...2019-oconnell-wessely-et-al.8270/#post-145802

 

I just had a looked at the slides and well Fluff a Duck is all I can say

Slides http://healthcareimprovementscotlan...6b1be6-3b8a-4732-8885-6adb13311310&version=-1

 

There clearly is a push to eventually reclassify everything they can't understand as FND. The underlying belief being that there is only one functional disorder but with different manifestations which gives rise to myriad diagnoses.

 

Stone probably moved away from some of the stances displayed in the, in my opinion, very muddled paper from 2005 co-authered with Sharpe.

Among more recent publications, his sadly unsuccessful effort to have FND categorized in the ICD neurology chapter and not as a dissociative disorder (if I undestood this properly), might indicate such an altered stance. In any case, I think these efforts are to be appreciated.

But to me, Stone still seems to be not clear about what he is saying and meaning. So at least one continuity appears to be his muddled writing.

Another point is, that neurological diseases or head injuries can be (and I think often are to a higher percentage than non-neurological diseases[?]) accompanied by emotional and mental issues and if needed, patients should openly be offered assessment and treatment for these issues, too.

 

Re. the slide above. I have wondered before how many instances of malingering are the result of a dysfunctional healthcare-system/patient relationship where the patient is not taken seriously and tries to be taken more seriously by exaggerating their problems.

 

https://www.neurosymptoms.org/not-imagined/4594358022

"You don’t have a disease..."

 

We still have two threads on this but not sure if they should be merged.

I agree. I think Stone's approach to diagnosis may be very fair. FND is a very real problem and it makes sense to talk of it as a software rather than a hardware problem. Even software involves physical changes - but in both computers and brains it probably involves abnormal patterns of normal types of microscopic change in information storing structures. (The same thing applies to autoantibody formation in a sense.)

Where Stone still seems muddled is in the treatment he is recommending (I think) and maybe in putting things across to journalists as if the same old 'mind interacting with body' story were involved.

 

... but an illness:

https://www.neurosymptoms.org/limb-weakness/4594358036

There seems to be a difference between disease and illness?

(I have to admit that I don't understand the difference. The German language has the terms "Krankheit" and "Erkrankung", but I'm not sure if they mean different things.)