> People are incredibly reluctant to believe that ailments might actually be partly or mainly psychological.
There are two simple reasons why people don't want their ailments to be psychological.
First, there are no real tests for determining if something is psychological or physical. Doctors just test for some stuff, and if the tests come back negative or inconclusive, they just explain it away as "psychological." You can never be sure whether you have a physical problem or whether your doctor is just lazy.
Second, the medical system just gives up on you if the issue is psychosomatic. There are no treatment protocols that work, so agreeing that something is psychological is just having your case tossed on the trash heap to be ignored.
Modern medicine does have a light side and a dark side. On the light side are known ailments with known tests and treatments. On the dark side is everything fuzzy and uncertain. Doctors HATE being faced with ambiguity, and patients know that if their case falls into the dark side that treatment and recovery are hopeless.
> Second, the medical system just gives up on you if the issue is psychosomatic. There are no treatment protocols that work, so agreeing that something is psychological is just having your case tossed on the trash heap to be ignored.
Maybe it's because we need to change our approach to psychotherapies in general. The reason psychology as a whole is not considered hard science is because replication is hard and in some cases impossible (good luck finding subjects who haven't heard about the Stanford prison experiment today). Why don't we accept this is just the way it works. That some therapies will work for some people and won't work at all for others (or might even make their symptoms worse). That therapy needs much more time than a pill to work - instead of hours, we're talking weeks and months, possibly years. That the evaluation of the results always has an element of subjectivity: sure, you can measure some physiological aspects, but there is always the internal component of well-being.
> There are two simple reasons why people don't want their ailments to be psychological.
Another reason is that most people find it scary if someone starts tinkering with their psyche. I honestly think that every therapy should start with strategies to overcome this fear.
There are two simple reasons why people don't want their ailments to be psychological.
First, there are no real tests for determining if something is psychological or physical. Doctors just test for some stuff, and if the tests come back negative or inconclusive, they just explain it away as "psychological." You can never be sure whether you have a physical problem or whether your doctor is just lazy.
Second, the medical system just gives up on you if the issue is psychosomatic. There are no treatment protocols that work, so agreeing that something is psychological is just having your case tossed on the trash heap to be ignored.
Modern medicine does have a light side and a dark side. On the light side are known ailments with known tests and treatments. On the dark side is everything fuzzy and uncertain. Doctors HATE being faced with ambiguity, and patients know that if their case falls into the dark side that treatment and recovery are hopeless.