Thinking about that time when I almost died during surgery due to reaction to anaesthesia, and in the next surgery the anaesthetist wrote me a letter to document the situation due to my “anxieties around anaesthesia”
Sir, I almost died?!
Psychologisation is dangerous
Brain-retraining logic applied to a broken leg to show how illogical it is:
Stumble, notice the leg, get anxious about standing, avoid standing, standing feels harder, avoid it more.
Conclusion: no fracture, just a fear-avoidance loop. Reassurance and graded standing will fix it.
Thinking about that time when I almost died during surgery due to reaction to anaesthesia, and in the next surgery the anaesthetist wrote me a letter to document the situation due to my “anxieties around anaesthesia”
Sir, I almost died?!
Psychologisation is dangerous
Hi Hannah,
Your comment is not just wrong. It is deeply disrespectful and genuinely inhumane.
Please, before speaking with such certainty, look at the recent medical literature on ME/CFS. This disease is not psychological. It is a serious, multi-system biological illness involving the immune system, nervous system, autonomic function, metabolism, circulation, and energy production.
I’m university educated. I was a tech founder and CEO. I had a beautiful girlfriend, a full life, ambition, independence, and every reason to want to be out in the world.
I snowboarded, fly-fished, hiked, travelled the world, worked relentlessly, and lived in the mountains because being outdoors was one of the great loves of my life. From my bedroom window, I can still see the peaks I would give almost anything to hike again.
I would cut off my arms and legs if it meant having the physical capacity to live normally again.
I now have very severe ME/CFS with extreme physical, cognitive, and sensory disability.
I lost my work. I lost my partner of seven years. I lost my ability to have sex. My ability to speak is greatly diminished. I cannot tolerate light, sound, television, podcasts, reading, touch, human presence, or even emotional expression. Crying, laughing, or pushing slightly too hard can leave me with severe physical symptom exacerbation for days. Sometimes, if I push too far, the worsening is permanent.
This is not anxiety. This is not deconditioning. This is not a lack of motivation. This is not a belief system.
Yes, the CNS and autonomic nervous system are profoundly dysfunctional, but that is only part of the picture. The depth of biological disruption in ME/CFS is staggering.
The suffering is almost impossible to describe. It is not tiredness. It is not burnout. It is a state of being trapped inside a body that punishes basic human activity.
Words like yours are not harmless. They contribute to the stigma that leaves severely ill people dismissed, neglected, and abandoned while they are already living through something close to hell.
Please open your eyes. Read the science. Listen to patients. This disease is real, and the people suffering from it deserve basic human respect.
The opinion you have is outdated and lacking any serious scientific basis.
Please, just for a moment, imagine that you might be wrong.
Imagine that the people living with this disease are not lazy, anxious, deconditioned, or mistaken about their own bodies. Imagine that they are describing a real biological illness that medicine has failed to properly understand for decades.
Because that is the reality.
@Etanarachel Just go to Google Scholar and you will find thousands of peer reviewed studies. There’s plenty of evidence.
“There are none so blind as those who will not see"
This is the article to amplify this week.
“Long COVID confirmed a difficult reality: modern healthcare systems are optimized for diseases that can be rapidly diagnosed, categorized, and treated — not illnesses that require uncertainty tolerance, longitudinal care, and deep listening.”
Long COVID Changed Everything https://t.co/oo6pNxyR1q