A thoughtful & thought-provoking article, thanks Sarah. I wonder whether the underlying problem is conventional medicine's neglect/denial of psychosomatic conditions? The failure of a the standard physical vs mental model to explain or treat the kind of symptoms you experienced leaves patients frustrated and vulnerable to snake oil alternatives rather than evidenced psycho-social treatments like the routine & physical activity you cite. Medical education is still stuck in the 1950s!
That's an interesting point - I definitely think both medics and patients labour under the "real"/"in your head" model of illness, and there's both a tendency for doctors to be dismissive of anything without a clear physical cause, and for patients to badly want a physical label that validates their status as "sick". (It's really interesting to me that patient support groups are the main forces driving medicalised interpretations of chronic Lyme, CFS and long covid.)
A thoughtful & thought-provoking article, thanks Sarah. I wonder whether the underlying problem is conventional medicine's neglect/denial of psychosomatic conditions? The failure of a the standard physical vs mental model to explain or treat the kind of symptoms you experienced leaves patients frustrated and vulnerable to snake oil alternatives rather than evidenced psycho-social treatments like the routine & physical activity you cite. Medical education is still stuck in the 1950s!
That's an interesting point - I definitely think both medics and patients labour under the "real"/"in your head" model of illness, and there's both a tendency for doctors to be dismissive of anything without a clear physical cause, and for patients to badly want a physical label that validates their status as "sick". (It's really interesting to me that patient support groups are the main forces driving medicalised interpretations of chronic Lyme, CFS and long covid.)