Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
Over the next 20 or so years, expect a lot of syndromes/conditions to be reclassified, as Michael Sharpe puts in the article, as "biological condition[s] that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors.".<p>I struggled with RSI for a couple of years until I read John Sarno's "The Mind-Body Connection" on the recommendation of someone from HN. Sarno'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 "my pain isn't real". Sarno's book very clearly lays out that the pain <i>is real</i>, it's just caused by processes in your brain, not the rest of your body.<p>Societally it's all very strange. We accept a "mind-body" connection for certain types of disorders, but, not for others. Anxiety sufferers can fool themselves into thinking they're having a heart attack and hyperventilate. Why is it crazy or anti-scientific to think that the same can cause other symptoms? We've searched for decades for body-based mechanisms for these chronic pain conditions, why not consider causes in the brain?