I found an article about inappropriate things professionals in healthcare settings have been heard saying, and a lot of it is pretty bad. But it was nice to see a doctor in a medical publication saying what I’ve been saying for years: The brain is a physical organ.
MedPage Today – The Worst Thing I’ve Heard a Doctor Say — Awkward, offensive, cringe-inducing things colleagues have said by Mikhail Varshavski, DO October 17, 2024 My name is Jake Goodman and I’m in my last year of psychiatry residency. The worst thing I have ever heard a doctor say about a patient was, “It’s all in his head. It’s not real.” In our head is a really complex thing called a brain. It’s an organ just like any other organ in your body and it can get sick, just like with your other organs. If your pancreas gets sick, you can get pancreatitis. If your lungs get sick, you can get emphysema. If your brain gets sick, you can get depression or anxiety, [post-traumatic stress disorder], psychosis, and insomnia. It’s in our heads, but that doesn’t make it not real. It’s as real as any other medical condition.
I think often calling something psychosomatic is a cop-out by clinicians for stuff they don’t understand or whatever medical science hasn’t figured out already. Which is why it gets applied often to people with Long Covid and various post-infection conditions that are poorly understood, or even poorly studied so far. And it’s why there’s this weird carve out for mental health where it’s not treated as healthcare, for example by having separate insurance coverage for “behavioral health” – a term that seems to indicate the purpose is controlling behavior rather than relieving suffering.
I go further and say that the assertion of “psychosomatic” or “all in the head” is actually based in superstition.
Political abuse of behavioral science and mental health. Chloe Humbert Apr 12, 2024 Anyone who tells you a health issue, mental illness or physical illness, is “purely psychological” is telling you they believe in superstition and metaphysics, they are not talking about medical science, because the brain is a physical organ, and there is no thought or behaviour divorced from the human body in scientific terms – only in supernatural or religious terms.