Sick building syndrome: is it the buildings or the people who need treatment?

[Mfairma]

Has this been posted yet?

https://mosaicscience.com/story/sick-building-syndrome-buildings-or-people/

Didn't see it. Might be worth a few people engaging the author on twitter.

I only skimmed it, but it discusses the functional disease nonsense and mentions CFS as part of that.

I'm always amazed at how people are so unable to see that to support the idea of functional disease, particularly in the way discussed in this article, is to say that all diseases have been discovered and that the mislabelling of poorly understood diseases as psychological is a thing of the past.

 

[Mfairma]

I just went through and read it more fully. Definitely a lot to unpack, and a lot in the writing and tone that I found alternatingly high-handed, dismissive, naive, and credulous. It's a curious article, in part because she claims to have suffered from some health problems that she now attributes to psychogenicity, which seems to make her inclined to not question the loose logic of some of the psychosocial doctors she discusses in the article.

To amend what I said before, on a read through, she devotes a lot of time to suggesting she has taken seriously the claims of the people she is discussing, but doesn't question at all the logic of lumping together and studying a bunch of different diseases on the assumption that they are psychogenic, which is ignorant of how medicine has treated diseases in the past and ignorant to how psychosocial doctors have reacted to the disproving of their theories in specific diseases (such as ME) by creating still broader disease categories that they can apply their theories anew.

Pretty infuriating article, all together. I feel bad for those interviewed for it. Her tone does not leave me with the feeling that she seriously considered their viewpoints. Particularly galling, to me, she largely dismisses the care being given by the few specialists that sufferers prefer and seems to dismiss avoidance of mould as a treatment. While I have some skepticism myself about mould, she might just as easily dismiss ME doctors who endorse pacing and are, in most cases, unable to offer much other than supplements.

 

[Esther12]

I found the tone too much to get through (it was very long too!). Might be useful for showing the sorts of things in personal stories that can be used against people? I find this sort of anecdote driven journalism a bit of an uninteresting slog.

Mosaic is the Wellcome Trust magazine - they're major funders of the Science Media Centre, which is based at the Wellcome Trust building.

 

[Mfairma]

Yeah, I saw Wellcome and had a bad association, but couldn't remember what the broader connections were.

I don't mind anecdote-driven in terms of interest, but for science journalism, it lets the author get away with implying many things without having to say much concrete that might need to be defended.

I don't recall seeing other similar content by the writer, Shayla Love.