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by Gibbon1 1019 days ago
An interesting thing is the number of conditions attributed to psychosomatic causes has been steadily shrinking over the last 100 years.

50 years ago if you had IBS or crohn's disease your doctor would send you to a psychiatrist

2 comments

This is just not good reasoning. Just because some things have been mechanistically explained in the past 50 years doesn't mean that any arbitrary condition will eventually be non-somatically explained. In fact, the argument (vacuous as it is) could go the other way - anything that has left after we've shrunk the pool so considerably is considerably more likely to not have a non-somatic mechanistic explanation than anything in the original pool.

And FWIW, CBT is effective for IBS. But with the gut-brain connection, we really are pushing up against the bounds of mind-body dualism with stuff like this.

30 years ago if you had an ulcer they'd send you to a psychiatrist.