The History of Biopsychosocial medicine-- Informative article

For anyone interested in how things got going leading down the current path of BPS.

It's a long article and sadly I did not read the whole thing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5795290/

 

The only thing I learned from this article is that the history of BPS medicine in Germany is boring. Nothing interesting happened.

The authors also firmly believe that unexplained symptoms means psychosomatic symptoms. This logical fallacy is what their profession is based on

 

i.e. its irrational. I discussed this in a blog some years back on PR.

 

The absence of basic awareness, let alone self-reflection, of the numerous failures of this field is absurd. The same researchers who love to gloat at failure in real competing research "LOL rituximab failed, patients were sooo stupid to hope it would work" never even acknowledge that dozens of major diseases were confidently argued to be psychogenic by their predecessors, using exactly the same arguments and the same loopy cycles of perpetuating "impure" thoughts. They just recycle the same garbage, nearly as is. Only the fonts and labels change a bit, everything else is nearly identical.

I don't understand why medicine in general allows this nonsense. It's as if every astrophysics department had a resident group of astrologers trying to apply new meaning out of old ideas. It just reeks of a desire to have someone, anyone, handle "those patients", regardless of what happens to us.

It could actually be useful if they let go of magical thinking but instead you basically get decades of fine-tuning around the proper pronunciation of leviosah, le-viiiio-sah, leVI-oooo-sah.

A field of science that can't acknowledge its mistakes needs either a thorough reform or deserves to be nuked from orbit.

 

I vote for the latter. As a wise man once said, its the only way to be sure. You can quote me on that saying, its ironclad just like psychobabble.

Changing definitions and meanings is one of the hallmarks of psychobabble, particularly if it keeps being done.

This issue raises the question as to how much of medicine and medical claims can be trusted. There are answers to that, but they are often ignored by medical researchers and clinicians. Fortunately there are many doctors and scientists who are well aware of what distinguishes quality science from pseudoscience.

Which raises the question - why don't these doctors and scientists complain more? Sometimes they do. However its part of medical culture, a bad part, to not ask questions about failures. Again, not all clinicians and scientists fail to step up. Its just that too many do.

Scientists and doctors have a duty to science and medicine to speak out about bad research.