[s0kr8s]

The central epistemological question with regard to PANS / PANDAS is not free will, but rather: how do you study or measure a phenomenon that violently fights back and is possibly even willing to die in order to prevent your attempts to measure or study it?

Try getting someone who is working overtime to try and harm you and destroy everything around them to have a blood draw done, or to lie down for 45 minutes for an MRI. It's not a cake-walk. Sure, you can sedate them, but the sedating medications skew the tests. In fact, in the context of an immune-mediated disease, any sort of measurement that induces stress may alter the immune system's state and skew your results, because the immune system and stress interact.

Trying to bring objectivity to the study of PANS / PANDAS is kind of like trying to bring objectivity to quantum-physics. Good luck getting a wildly chaotic, stochastic system to reveal its "truth" to you.

I suspect you could say the same with regard to free-will.

In fact, I sometimes think of consciousness and perhaps the brain itself as an extension of the immune system. There are interesting structural similarities between lymph nodes and the brain. That would then recast all psychological problems as a sort of auto-immune condition.