A Designer Disease?
I remember the phrase DesignerDisease from a former medical student I went to school with. He did a research paper and said syndromes such as Lyme Disease, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and others that were popular in the 90s were all Designer Diseases. What he was saying was that it was hip and cool at the time to claim you had this “disease”. He was also saying it was supratentorial and he was probably right. I think it is becoming obvious that Long Covid, a diagnosis that puts whatever symptom you want in it, fits right in there. Do you know what else is supratentorial and hip and cool now? Transgenderism. See the chart below:
This chart is the from UK and it is old now. It is much worse and higher today. Also, see this post here about rapid onset of gender dysphoria. All this was classified as a psychiatric illness until recently and then politics overtook science and the healthcare system.
Is it possible that there is some commonality between the designer disease of Long Covid and the social contagion of transgenderism?
Interesting. Your thoughts?
Fibromyalgia was a designer disease until the rheumatologists actually were able to scientifically classify it. I had several with the diagnosis that weren’t trying to get narcs. I’d try the anti-depressants, NSAIDS if their
GI tract could tolerate it and as a last resort narcs. Many of them were better on a long term, low dose narcotic regimen and didn’t seek to jack up the dose. This was in patients I sent to rheumatology for confirmation and they’d turf them back to me for long term care after agreeing to the diagnosis. They weren’t dumping back on me as their consult letters were very multi-page long and obvious they gave the diagnosis long thought. Plus the patients would have to travel very long distances for rheumatology followup.
This transgender stuff is simply crazy and I believe it started to become a problem when the media started touting it. Never saw it in 33 years in practice. Sure I’d see gay and lesbians but they didn’t want to change their sex.
We call these syndromes trash can diagnosis or idiopathic (i.e. we are idiots and don’t understand it). These designer diagnosis are our feeble attempt to try to make the symptoms or behaviors make sense. Make no mistake that for the vast majority of people that experience these constellation of symptoms or behaviors there is a cause. I think that for the transgender phenomena it is simply people that are gay who realize that there sexual organs do not match their sexual identity which is a determined by the wiring in your brain that is set during pregnancy. Congenital Adrenal hyperplasia is a good example of this concept.