as small as a world and as large as alone

9:55am May 26, 2014

lysikan:

youneedacat:

kristenpurgeswords:

Pain pain pain.

And everything is coming back normal or negative.

“Maybe it’s something that’s bit showing up”
“Maybe it’s something psychological”
“Maybe your mind is producing pain for you”

There are lots of kinds of pain that do not show up on tests.

Most medical problems do not show up on tests, in fact.  The things we can diagnose with tests are fewer than the things we can’t.

Assuming that because something doesn’t show up on a test, then it must be psychological, is ridiculous and bad medicine.  Especially since I think they’ve actually studied it, and when they really did lots of testing of people diagnosed as having psychosomatic conditions, they almost always uncovered a physical cause if they did enough tests for long enough.  Meaning “This is psychological” is usually a doctor’s lazy way of saying “We don’t know” — actual psychological things manifesting as physical things are vanishingly rare in comparison.

And the idea of pain that’s psychological is almost 100% bullshit.  Pain is physical.  It can come from various parts of the body, it can come from nerves, it can come from the brain (central pain), but all those things are physical.  And lots of painful things don’t show up on tests.

And even when something does show up on a test, you have to do the right test.  I had severe untreated adrenal insufficiency for years.  At minimum, six years.  And they did lots and lots of tests, but it took them six years to do the right test to find it.  So just because something isn’t on a test now doesn’t mean it won’t be sometime down the road.

But mostly “We don’t know the cause so it’s psychological” is ableist BS, not the actual practice of responsible medicine.  (And yes, I know that psychological things are just as real as physical things.  But that doesn’t change the fact that something like 99% of things diagnosed as psychosomatic, aren’t psychosomatic at all.)

Yup! Look at fibromyalgia for an example of a real problem that doctors for a LONG time called “psychological” and the symptoms “psychosomatic”.

Doctors even though of multiple sclerosis as psychosomatic/hysterical before they finally found the cause.  They have a track record of doing that, especially for diseases more commonly found in women.

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