4 ms·

I had a psychologist tell me about a case once where a person had a condition (I forget which, I think it was mild diabetes) but only when they were living at h

by api 8y ago

I had a psychologist tell me about a case once where a person had a condition (I forget which, I think it was mild diabetes) but only when they were living at home with their family. They tested positive for this condition. It wasn't all in their head. But then again it was in some sense. They spent time away from their family and their condition would stabilize to the point that they'd no longer test positive. I asked about things like diet and sleep and the guy telling me the story said that this was of course the first thing they checked and the person's diet and sleep habits hadn't changed. The psychologist who told me this story wasn't particularly "woo-woo" and was personally blown away by it. He said you can find other cases like this in the literature. Anecdotes like that aren't proof, but they're interesting in that they agree with some of this placebo effect research. It looks as if the brain has more influence over the body than we realize or understand.

raincom 8y ago
VS Ramachandran's Phantoms in Brain (p.224): "A second example of a genuine anomaly is multiple personality dis order or MPD, which in my view may turn out to be just as important for medicine as continental drift was for geology. To this day MPD continues to be ignored by the medical community even though it provides a valuable testing ground for the claims of mind-body medicine. In this syndrome-immortalized by Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-a person can assume two or more distinct personalities, each of which is completely unaware, or only dimly aware, of the others. Again, there have been occasional reports in the clinical literature that one personality can be diabetic while the other is not, or that various vital signs and hormone profiles can be different in the two personalities. There is even a claim that one personality can be allergic to a substance while the other is not and that one might be myopic-or nearsighted whereas the other has 20/20 vision."

by api 8y ago

raincom 8y ago

VS Ramachandran's Phantoms in Brain (p.224): "A second example of a genuine anomaly is multiple personality dis order or MPD, which in my view may turn out to be just as important for medicine as continental drift was for geology. To this day MPD continues to be ignored by the medical community even though it provides a valuable testing ground for the claims of mind-body medicine. In this syndrome-immortalized by Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-a person can assume two or more distinct personalities, each of which is completely unaware, or only dimly aware, of the others. Again, there have been occasional reports in the clinical literature that one personality can be diabetic while the other is not, or that various vital signs and hormone profiles can be different in the two personalities. There is even a claim that one personality can be allergic to a substance while the other is not and that one might be myopic-or nearsighted whereas the other has 20/20 vision."