Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
Over the next 20 or so years, expect a lot of syndromes&#x2F;conditions to be reclassified, as Michael Sharpe puts in the article, as &quot;biological condition[s] that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors.&quot;.<p>I struggled with RSI for a couple of years until I read John Sarno&#x27;s &quot;The Mind-Body Connection&quot; on the recommendation of someone from HN. Sarno&#x27;s thesis is that many chronic pain conditions (those without a clear physical mechanism, such as RSI or chronic back pain) are psychosomatic.<p>A lot of people struggle with this idea, and take it, as they did in the article, as &quot;my pain isn&#x27;t real&quot;. Sarno&#x27;s book very clearly lays out that the pain <i>is real</i>, it&#x27;s just caused by processes in your brain, not the rest of your body.<p>Societally it&#x27;s all very strange. We accept a &quot;mind-body&quot; connection for certain types of disorders, but, not for others. Anxiety sufferers can fool themselves into thinking they&#x27;re having a heart attack and hyperventilate. Why is it crazy or anti-scientific to think that the same can cause other symptoms? We&#x27;ve searched for decades for body-based mechanisms for these chronic pain conditions, why not consider causes in the brain?