It's easy to laugh off those freaks, I did it too before I became one.
TL,DR: OCD behaviors are boosted by physiological stress, we can redesign our world for less stress, and there is in fact a big risk that medicine doesn't help you in non-emergencies situation.
I relate the Morgellons story to candida as you can see people on curezone talking about it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candida_albicans). People on this board sound as desillusional as in the story, looking at their poops for hours and trying all kind of enemas and diets in giant waves of pseudoscience. It's also the same notion that something wrong is hidden in you, an evil invisible root cause.
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Long story short, after years of various strange affections on an otherwise healthy body, I found information online on candida. Symptoms matched to a point and so I spent some time on blogs and boards and eventually landed on curezone. I ended up looking at my poop like so many others there. Doubt really is infectious, everything becomes blurry and so I started watching for the tell-tell sign of candida, just in case. Still surprised that I ended up doing this.
After a few weeks (months?) I realized I was getting OCD with that and needed to move on to a better obsession. Doctors had also told me that it didn't make any sense and everything on the net was just BS. My problems were somatic and so I found a better obsession.
The funny thing is that years later, after symptoms got worse, a stool test did diagnose me with candida along with other parasites that I had gotten as a kid in Africa. I got cured and never felt better since then. It did change my life. I still feel that I was a loony when I try to auto-diagnose - it was just a coincidence that candida was involved, my method was all wrong. Candida is not visible to the naked eye, and there's next to no chance to auto-diagnose and auto-cure from it without coaching.
I take from this that our medicine system is designed around emergencies and clear symptoms and does not deal with many new "blurry" pathologies born out from stressful lifestyles. Challenges:
- those guys (and I) need care designed around empathy, listening and being coached into healthier lifestyles. There's next to no offer for that. Psychiatrists and mental specialists are siloed into talking and/or meds. There are real physiological and practical aspects that need to be added and followed up for it to be effective.
- I was lucky to be able to afford a holistic nutritionist working with leading labs to perform expensive stool tests that finally helped me. Including treatment, it cost me above £1500, 0% supported by healthcare (it was in the UK, would have been the same in France or anywhere else, I bet). For most, most doctors are still siloed in their discipline and provide neither empathy nor a convincing bridge between info found online and their own expertise.
- our lifestyles are inducing high level of physiological stress that our human organisms can't deal with. Work, food, cities, that goes way beyond medicine: redesigning all those things to limit stress levels is _the_ opportunity for our generation.
Persistent, low levels of stress are extremely unhealthy. Looking back at my life, I ended up maladapting to these in every scenario, hurting myself and wasting years of my life in the process. If something isn't right, it needs to change, and you can't delay. The failure to enact change creates a feedback loop that makes you more passive, which sucks you of hope, which makes you less likely to create change.
Again: to anyone reading this, do not just put up with long-term, 'smaller' stresses. At least try to work on them. We do not do well with stress + uncertainty combined.
TL,DR: OCD behaviors are boosted by physiological stress, we can redesign our world for less stress, and there is in fact a big risk that medicine doesn't help you in non-emergencies situation.
I relate the Morgellons story to candida as you can see people on curezone talking about it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candida_albicans). People on this board sound as desillusional as in the story, looking at their poops for hours and trying all kind of enemas and diets in giant waves of pseudoscience. It's also the same notion that something wrong is hidden in you, an evil invisible root cause.
---
Long story short, after years of various strange affections on an otherwise healthy body, I found information online on candida. Symptoms matched to a point and so I spent some time on blogs and boards and eventually landed on curezone. I ended up looking at my poop like so many others there. Doubt really is infectious, everything becomes blurry and so I started watching for the tell-tell sign of candida, just in case. Still surprised that I ended up doing this.
After a few weeks (months?) I realized I was getting OCD with that and needed to move on to a better obsession. Doctors had also told me that it didn't make any sense and everything on the net was just BS. My problems were somatic and so I found a better obsession.
The funny thing is that years later, after symptoms got worse, a stool test did diagnose me with candida along with other parasites that I had gotten as a kid in Africa. I got cured and never felt better since then. It did change my life. I still feel that I was a loony when I try to auto-diagnose - it was just a coincidence that candida was involved, my method was all wrong. Candida is not visible to the naked eye, and there's next to no chance to auto-diagnose and auto-cure from it without coaching.
I take from this that our medicine system is designed around emergencies and clear symptoms and does not deal with many new "blurry" pathologies born out from stressful lifestyles. Challenges:
- those guys (and I) need care designed around empathy, listening and being coached into healthier lifestyles. There's next to no offer for that. Psychiatrists and mental specialists are siloed into talking and/or meds. There are real physiological and practical aspects that need to be added and followed up for it to be effective.
- I was lucky to be able to afford a holistic nutritionist working with leading labs to perform expensive stool tests that finally helped me. Including treatment, it cost me above £1500, 0% supported by healthcare (it was in the UK, would have been the same in France or anywhere else, I bet). For most, most doctors are still siloed in their discipline and provide neither empathy nor a convincing bridge between info found online and their own expertise.
- our lifestyles are inducing high level of physiological stress that our human organisms can't deal with. Work, food, cities, that goes way beyond medicine: redesigning all those things to limit stress levels is _the_ opportunity for our generation.