[Atsuii]

PCOS is a strange one for you to throw in there considering it has a physical manifestation that can be very reliably tested for via an ultrasound. The others are things that are quite often diagnosed via process of elimination and don’t have definitive tests.

[willcipriano]

People get negative ultrasounds and claim doctors just hate them or refuse to help them.

I think a part of this is online communities spring up around these diseases and a doctor telling you that you don't have it is basically them telling you they don't get to hang out with your friends anymore.

Better data exists for IBS on this line of thinking:

> The Illness Attitudes Scales (IAS) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were administered to 40 patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and these were compared with 35 patients with organic gastrointestinal (GI) disease, 37 depressed patients, and 40 healthy volunteers.

> All the patient groups had abnormal IAS scores compared with the healthy group, but these were most marked among the IBS patients with elevated scores on six out of the eight subscales. Three of these were specific to the IBS patients: bodily preoccupation, hypochondriacal beliefs and disease phobia.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7595881/

[reedf1]

What do you suggest is done then? Given some people experience legitimate IBS, what quantity of false negatives (i.e. legitimate sufferers who are ignored by the medical system) are you willing to tolerate?

Also - given medical developments in gut health on GABA, the gut-brain link is not so crazy. So your study could be a reverse causation.

[willcipriano]

> What do you suggest is done then?

After no physical ailments are detected, they should be treated by psychologists rather than physicians.

[reedf1]

So your priors are the we've got an omnipotent medical system? I really wish we did!

[willcipriano]

Is a brain gut link or not? If the gut isn't the problem the next stop would be the brain.

[reedf1]

And if the brain seems fine, where do we go then?

[CipherThrowaway]

This doesn't say what you think it does. IBS being co-morbid with anxiety is not evidence that people are spuriously identifying as sufferers. It's the expected finding for a disorder in which psychological stress and the brain-gut axis are thought to be major causative factors.

[jnovek]

I don’t have a source handy, but I seem to recall that ultrasound as criteria for PCOS has been criticized recently because it has a high rate of both false positives and false negatives.