Understanding persistent physical symptoms: Conceptual integration of psychological expectation models and predictive processing accounts, 2020, Kube

Perhaps we should have a sub-forum for this kind of publication called "Speculative fiction"?

Paywall, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272735820300179
Sci hub, https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.cpr.2020.101829

 

Health psychologists acquire false and dysfunctional beliefs about reality during training and then wreck other people's lives with them and are also quite immune to disconfirmatory information.

It's also amusing to see them struggle to find new ways to say it's all the mind and imaginary while insisting they are saying no such thing.

 

I think we are extremely good at processing medical reassurance - we know exactly what it is worth.

 

I did hear recently of a professor who wished to refer a patient for treatment at a private clinic where the practitioner's highest qualification appeared to be one in creative writing. It seems to be a useful skill these days.

 

@chrisb

Brings writing paper, writing pen, and coloured crayons for corrections, and don't show off, it intimidates other people.

 

This reads exactly like satire of psychosomatic ideology. It would truly make great satire if it weren't a serious word salad attempt at sounding smart.

Intelligence without wisdom. Ugh, so mediocre. This field is inventing so many novel models of the same thing you'd think they get a free coffee at every dozen. It would be really great if someone were to make a tally of how exactly how many nearly identical psychosomatic models exist out there. Just the ones that are generally listed as being in use at least amount to a whole dozen. I'm pretty sure we've reached 100 by now, with mostly cosmetic and framing distinctions but otherwise talking round and round about the same things.

Seriously cringeworthy and oh would you like at that Eysenck-type thingy:

The only disability is a bad attitude. Thanks, I'm cured!

Wow I had no idea all healthy people are optimistic people who positively integrate new information that makes a lot of sense when you look at the comments section on politics news, everyone is so darn positive out there. That makes perfect sense I've never seen an angry/negative person who is healthy in my life no sir not ever.

Frankly this is seriously advanced foolishness, but mostly it's just the same old rehash of "rousing reassurance" is all the worried well need and chronic symptoms are nothing but a refusal to accept this reassurance based on unhelpful illness beliefs. So literally the same tripe that's been integrated into "novel models" dozens, if not hundreds, of times, always novel, always the same.

It's getting frustrating that people are being paid generous salaries to produce this garbage.

 

This reads like a humanities piece written by someone who identifies unironically as a 'post-modern radical neo-Marxist feminist critical cultural theorist' or something.

Just apply some 'theoretical frames' to a problem and pass off the resulting drivel as highly valuable insight. No need to check for grounding in science or even common sense.

Pure self-satire.

 

The authors seem to reference their own prior theoretical papers to bolster their arguments. The whole thing is based on the premise that people with so-called PPS do not have any organic problems that could be causing their symptoms.

 

Yes!

See what I did there?

 

My OH could until recently considered healthy. He has gone through life with a " glass half empty" attitude.
Health has nothing to do with how he frames interactions.
Generalised BS

 

Yes.

 

It goes a bit further and argues that the symptoms are irrelevant and have no actual impact, it's only the expectation that they are indicative of worse things that create the impact, catastrophising about having a fatal disease.

It frames the "symptoms" as something as impactful as the color or length of our hair, if we didn't think about them they wouldn't affect us at all, zero, zilch. Which is typical but it's a little more blatant than usual.

From my POV, I never considered that since the damn symptoms are plenty enough of a problem, the same way as even though the common cold or even most bouts of flu or food poisoning are not fatal, people are still very much affected by the symptoms and rarely think about it being more serious because it's already damn serious enough to disable you for many days.

Still that damn belief that chronic symptoms are completely different than acute ones and have nothing whatsoever in common despite our belief that we "have" "symptoms". Despite the fact that beyond a label we have no understanding whatsoever of how most symptoms even manifest themselves, and even those labels are mostly vague and often have different meanings for the same thing.

 

So......when I was barely 30 and in huge amounts of pain all of the time and happily ignoring them because my doc told me everything was normal and I believed her, assuming that maybe everyone my age felt this bad all of the time, how come I got worse?

 

This,
Thank you @Hutan

 

sci hub says it exist to make knowledge freely available .so why are they giving a platform to this philosophical bs that has and always will be disproved when the necessary research is finally done by people who actually understand biology and the scientific process. shame the loved ones who have lost people due to peptic ulcers cannot sue these tripe mongers .

 

Sci-hub is not a publisher. It's a piracy site for academic and scientific papers.

 

Also, if there is research that exists only behind a paywall it is much better to have it freely available on sci-hub for scrutiny. If you don't know it's there you can't high-light problems and expose it. This is the beauty of sci-hub.

They are not taking a philosophical position, they are about exposing science to scrutiny.
After all other researchers may cite this paper as somehow relevant and meaningful and build on their 'conceptual model'. Best it's out there where we can see it happening.

 

i can't go into this correctly or in depth for
health reasons, but as a clumsy statement of the obvious i'd
like to point out a few observations.

i believe in stating the obvious. i think it keeps
everybody (including myself) on the same page.


to me, most of this type of research, including major
trials, shares three distinctive characteristics. there are
a lot more, but the three that really stand out are as follows.

1) category error
2) attack
3) obscuring

the key observation is (2). if you forget everything else,
please remember (2).


let's do them one at a time.

1) category error

if i were to eliminate one of my three observations, it
would be this one. the other two to me are not
seriously challengeable.

this one is worth pointing out because it is
so, almost literally unbelievably, imbecilic.


when you follow the logic as if it were intended to
seek or convey truth, and get past the fact that it is
not, in fact, logic, to what seem to be the claims, the
claims consistently boil down to one or both of the
following:

- there is no disease. for example, nobody dies from
the disease whose population is being attacked.

at most it is ordinary bodily sensations like
passing wind, which are then magnified in your mind.

for example, you think you have hiv/aids, and that is
the problem. it is not that you HAVE an
hiv/aids-like disease. that is not the problem.
- the belief THAT you have the disease, or any serious
disease, IS, or CAUSES, the disease.

the first claim says that you are mistaken about
PRIMARY FACTS AND EXPERIENCES. they choose
experiences, which they deny using burden of proof
reversal. usually.

if that fails, they need to defend fact claims. but
they still have burden of proof reversal, so it isn't
so much defense as unchallenged ipsedixitism. it is
still at the level of child's play for them.

(in a truth-seeking environment, none of these claims
would exist in the first place. we have to conclude
that academia and medicine are significantly NOT
truth-seeking environments.)

FACT claims are demolished by existence proof (she
died), which drags you into a distracting back and
forth about who has the disease and so on, with you
having it if it suits their claims and you not having
it if not.

but after the long back and forth, which is almost
never followable to completion because there is no good mechanism
in academic discourse in practice in this
case to hold them in place for questioning, whenever the fact claims are demolished, the remaining
option is the second.

(courts of law, perhaps surprisingly?, probably do
significantly better than academia at this.)

so the second claim is really the claim being made in
this subset of this type of research....

... and the second claim -- that the COGNITIONS account
for the disease -- is the category error. so i have
finally got round to my point. apologies for it taking
so long.

this too is subject to diversion rhetoric, but if it
ever poked its head out too directly, even the
self-absorbed academic rabble might start to object.
it makes ALL of academia look bad. THEN they start to
care.

academics really don't care whether populations get
attacked as long as careers are preserved. 1900s
history demonstrates this.

so i think the second claim needs to, for those who
make it, not be revealed too blatantly in the wrong
forums.

so to get down to brass tacks: the category error can
be slipperified, but even if it is turned into a
non-category error, it turns into something like this:

- you can, directly by having beliefs, change multiple
body systems (this is like my hysterical edema post)

if challenged, the response turns to authority
(and spammed) "evidence based" assertions, photographs
of changed brains, excited and wide-eyed magazine
articles, and so on.

but the claim is not challenged on fundamental
scientific grounds. it is NOT a category error, but it
is not like 2 + 2 = 7 either. it is more like 2 + 2 =
avogadro's number. darwinian natural selection cannot
possibly make it make sense as a serious claim. and
that's enough to demolish the claim.

so what remains? a claim that is more like 2 + 2 =
milk. that is the category error.

to me, the thing that is most extraordinary about it is
the degree of imbecility. a young child knows that milk is not a number. yet such researchers defended a dissertation and were granted a doctoral degree.

it is an "i don't even".

2) attack

i can dispose of this one quickly. almost everything
in or connected with this type of research implicitly
or explicitly says one or more of the following:

- that you are illegitimate.
- that you are a burden to society.
- that you are not fully human or normal.

this, combined with the extensive supporting infrastructure, constitutes an attack on the population.

3) always the "right" amount of layering of obscuring
stuff to make (1) and (2) poke their heads out only
briefly.

they are logically entailed, or stated explicitly, or
implied, in every case, but they only make themselves
obvious to the casual reader infrequently, despite
always being there when you grasp the nettle.

by "obscuring stuff" i mean slipperiness, equivocation, ambiguity, vagueness, innuendo,
conflation, confusion, and in general a large
assortment of logical fallacies and eristic and
rhetorical tricks.

the forums in which the claims are made are NEVER
suited for sufficiently, if you were to take the claims
seriously, asking "what precisely do you mean by
that?"


the rest of the attack is implemented by an extensive
infrastructure that includes whoever makes boots on the
ground policy, propaganda including well-timed columnist
columns, press releases, and so on.

the moral inversion is just taken as normal. it seems actually
jarring and outside the ken of the typical observer, to have
any of this pointed out. the degree of effectiveness is
extraordinary.

it is resilient to changes in
politics, science, and academia in general. i am not alleging intent for any of the three observations. i am only saying they hold consistently.

the first only holds for a subset but it is curiously imbecilic.