I’m sure we have all heard of munchausin syndrome and I’ve always been curious. How does the brain and their thoughts make them physically sick? I’m not talking about people who take things to make them sick or pretend to feel sick, I’m talking about those who believe they are sick so strongly that they get the physical symptoms. People who get so sick with the fake illness that it can affect their lives.
In: Biology
Nobody actually knows. This type of illness is basically: sick with symptoms and no known cause, so it is presumed to have a mental component causing it.
However, there are some doctors who believe the actual answer is this:
” In the days of the Malleus, if the physician could find no evidence of natural illness, he was expected to find evidence of witchcraft: today, if he cannot diagnose organic illness, he is expected to diagnose mental illness.” (Thomas Szasz, a well known psychiatrist who wrote on topics like psychiatry and its influence on medicine)
Or basically, that there may be a lot of diseases, conditions, disorders, etc… that are being misdiagnosed as psychosomatic, when it’s just the doctor not being able to diagnose it and not wanting to say, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong.’
In various surveys of people with auto-immune disorders and rare disorders, usually over half of them had one or more doctors tell them that their physical symptoms were caused by anxiety or stress (psychosomatic) rather than a physical illness, before they were finally diagnosed.
This bias may be made worse by the fact that many auto-immune disorders and rare disorders ARE made worse by stress, so at first, treating stress will make symptoms improve, in many cases, but will cease to work years later as the disease/disorder progresses.
The mind is an amazing thing. Not unsimilar to mass hysteria, your mind has basically painted this picture, planted the idea of a sickness. You can convince yourself that you are sick to the point your body produces symptoms to match your mind. Because when you think about it, everything starts in your brain. “I think, there for I am” and “Mind over matter”. Placebos work the same way for the opposite effect- you think you’re taking a cure, so your mind convinces your body that you’re better.
And going back to the mass hysteria bit, there’s so many cases of one kid at school having a seizure, then all of a sudden their whole friend group is seizing (legit seizing, not faking it) then boom, the adults are seizing and it’s just mayhem, and it all stems from ‘i think, therefore I am’
This is probably a really terrible explanation haha but it’s the best I got.
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