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Psychosomatic diseases

Keneke

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Keneke
Joined
Jan 16, 2003
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In a recent online discussion, I saw this:

"77% of all ilnesses are Psycho-somatic."

You're gonna have to cite some HEAVY sources one that one.

Their reply was:

Hehe, I know that one would pop up. I actually got it from my speech textbook (college, do not have it by me right now), my Professor, as well as from a motivational guy named Ziglar. It is from an actual thingey...let me see if I can find it on google...

[url]http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Nudel6.html[/URL]


[url]http://users2.ev1.net/~frc/Stress%20nc/Class%201Pretest.htm[/URL]


[url]http://www.alternativehealthtalk.com/Yoga%20introduction%20to%20Tia%20Chi.htm[/URL]

[url]http://www.alltm.org/pages/quebec.html[/URL]

[url]http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~jaclynh2/symptoms.html[/URL]


Not the best, but you get the drift. I cannot find an actual study, but those are notoriously hard to locate anyway. Hope that is ggod enough for you. I got the 77% from a quote I heard, but it seems to be like 70-ish.
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This raises red flags in me, because "alternative health talk" as a reference really hurts the argument. I am busy researching this now, but does anyone know offhand if this is true or not? Anyone have any hard data?
 
1) Best get them to define illnesses and psycho-somatic first. Avoid finding out you are arguing about different things, you never can be sure about how they have defined these terms.

2) The only link that works is to selfgrowth, and that is selling a book.

3) So actually they need any data to support their stance.



77% of statistics are made up. (spike milligan)
 
1. I'll include that in my first response.

2. Hm, the links work foon the original website. Weird.

3. I suspect they'll rely on the websites that show people with PhD's behind their name, so the burden of proof may fall on me by way of "authority".
 
"Psychosomatic" really means nothing. Zero. Nada. Even "psychic" diseases have underlying biochemical causes. That's why antidepressants or antipsychotics work. The term has been used to describe diseases that affect behavior, but then again, a lot of other diseases not treated by psychiatrists can affect behavior.

Now, can stress cause so many bad things as described in the cited references ? My opinion is that our feelings can mildly affect the outcome of certain conditions, but not so much as some people want to believe. Those references provided are pure, simple, fresh BS. Some alternative health sites and the homepage of a student (?) that just happens to have "edu" in the url (for more credibility I guess). With references of such quality, I can prove anything. Ask for peer reviewed studies published in medical journals.
 
(the links don't work because you have included an HTML tag in them. If you remove </a> everything is fine)
 
These urls are giving me headaches.


But you're right, it's just poorly made webpages with a few PhDs thrown in. The HTML itself of traditional medical webpages and this junk just seems to be different.
 
El Greco said:
"Psychosomatic" really means nothing. Zero. Nada. Even "psychic" diseases have underlying biochemical causes. That's why antidepressants or antipsychotics work. The term has been used to describe diseases that affect behavior, but then again, a lot of other diseases not treated by psychiatrists can
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You mean "psychiatric" diseases, right? ;)
 
Suezoled said:
You mean "psychiatric" diseases, right? ;)
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Well, yes... :) I guess I am a victim of my mother language... "Psychic" is the root of both words, in Greek it means "of soul". In Greek, psychiatric diseases are called "psychic diseases" = "diseases of the soul". Literally translated, "psychiatric diseases" means "diseases of the soul medicine".

Oh well, psychics and disease go together anyway ;)
 
The newer links work. So it looks like they are talking about stress basically.

This page
http://www.hope.edu/academic/psychology/335/webrep2/stress.html


Shows that stress can make an illness worse

This page :
http://www.drnadig.com/stress.htm

shows some of the effects stress can have on you.

Now i would expect that if you were so inclined to do that alternative healing stuff then it could reduce your stress levels and thus lead to an improvement in you health. As i understand it they tend to be quite relaxing. This could be the mechanism by which they work. Many of the conditions they "cure" tend to be long term chronic illnesses that may well be mediated by stress.

As for 77% well see my previous comment. I'm always wary when a generalisation is given a specific value for incidence.
 
What El Greco said,
depression is frequently aggreavated by strees.

there is a great treatment for chronic pain too, anti depressants!
 
Keneke said:
Thanks. Never understood why %20 pops up in URLs anyway...weird.
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That is the URL encode for a space.

Other encodes include %27 which is the apostrophe ('), %22 which is the quotation mark ("), %23 which is the pound sign (#), etc. etc. etc. (a whole soiree of other crazy values...).
 
I've always suspected that the popularity of alternative medicine has something to do with the effect of attitude on the body. It would be a landslide discovery if it could be shown that any benefit of alternative medicine comes from gullibility itself, not any crackpot theory. People could stage their own parodies of alternative medicine, and get not only the psychosomatic benefit but the benefit of a few laughs as well. Alternative medicine would be out of business! :p
 
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