1) Many people who have post-surgical anxiety do respond to treatment. You&#x27;ll note that in the article being discussed, one of the other examples given was treated with CBT and anti-depressants and <i>got better</i>. The fact that the article pretty much built itself around the narrative of &quot;people thought he was crazy. Then a doctor somewhere took him seriously, and it was real&quot; does not mean the author of the article in any way did a sweeping education in psych and anxiety.<p>2) Anxiety is difficult to treat even in people who believe they have it and are committed to treatment; it&#x27;s not meaningful to say &quot;doctors who consider ENS to be probably psychogenic haven&#x27;t attempted to treat it with antidepressants.&quot; The article itself leads with a number of ENTs saying it&#x27;s psych and not seeing the patient - because he needed to go to see a psych, not an ENT, and he &#x2F;refused&#x2F; to go. He eventually got brief treatment, and bailed, because he was never actually convinced it was anxiety. There was only one other example of a patient in the article who was treated for psych., and that patient&#x27;s symptoms resolved.<p>You&#x27;re assuming that these patients get regularly treated for psych disorders, and that therefore the persistence of this meme indicates it&#x27;s not psychogenic. That, despite the fact that many of these patients refuse to believe they have a psychological disorder, and thus refuse to seek or continue treatment for that disorder. You, in fact, make this assumption despite <i>just</i> having read an article that stated repeatedly that he had pre-existing and untreated anxiety; that he went to multiple ENTs and got told &quot;it&#x27;s psych&quot; but avoided going to a psych for it; and when ultimately he admitted himself for psych care, he bailed after literally a couple of days because he was convinced the problem was his nose, not his mind.<p>Somehow, despite literally reading an entire biography of &quot;man with anxiety gets surgery, blames anxiety symptoms on surgery, avoids all psych care,&quot; you can still make an argument based on the assumption that these patients are getting adequate psych care, and thus we ought to rule it out.<p>But, hey, no. Let&#x27;s ignore the disease that has an 18% prevalence among US adults and accounts for all his symptoms, of which he has a history of even pre-dating the surgery, and instead suggest that it&#x27;s some rare new disease that just happens to overlap completely with anxiety symptoms.