Imagine spending your whole life becoming an academic expert. Then a random guy online tells you that you are wrong about your own field. And he's right. But you can never admit that. Because it would mean admitting that your life was a lie. That is the dilemma of many academics.

I’ve noticed the same.

The authors are revising the problematic sentence to indicate that the presumed mechanism for functional neurological symptoms is not a categorical fact but what is currently "thought" to be behind them.

Medicine consistently and flagrantly flips the script to blame the patient for its own failures. - Being socially isolated due to pain becomes you are in pain due to being socially isolated. - Deconditioning due to disability becomes you are disabled because you are deconditioned. - Depression or distress due to disease burden becomes you have disease burden because you are depressed or distressed. - Nerve damage due to untreated pain becomes you have pain because your nerves are too sensitive. And so on and so forth.

Some branches of neuroscience (and science in general) are unlikely to see real progress for a long time. This stagnation stems from an academic echo chamber that very effectively silences dissent. young researchers introducing new ideas are often marginalized or driven out before they can establish themselves. There must be quite a few of these people who left academia this way and are now working in industry. The current institutional framework simply won't fund or validate anyone bold enough to challenge entrenched ideas. It's a conformist paradise gated by tenure. BTW these stagnant areas tend to have dominant senior people who have never been wrong and shall remain "authorities" forever.

A friend asked me why I care about the identity capture in the chronic illness space. People's lives are hell, why are you bothering to intellectualize it? The reason is that I believe these things are deeply interconnected. I think this kind of structural, social analysis is actually far more important at this stage than the science. Science is done by people; is funded by people. Yes, there are hard science problems to be solved, but the bigger problems are upstream - social and political issues that prevent funding, or that see the wrong kinds of research get funded and the right kinds of research get ignored. To solve Long COVID, we're going to need billions, probably hundreds and hundreds of billions of funding. Way beyond big pharma. Do you think that will ever happen while the HHS is run by pandemic deniers and most of society is in denial? I don't think so. We need to find a way to change this. Again, I think the HIV historical example is illustrative - you need to create social and political movements in order to catalyze the science that's needed. It simply won't happen otherwise.

I can’t stop myself from sobbing uncontrollably when I speak to a doctor now. So traumatized.

“Ask courageous questions. Do not be satisfied with superficial answers. Be open to wonder and at the same time subject all claims to knowledge, without exception, to intense critical scrutiny. Be aware of human fallibility. Cherish your species and your planet.” — Carl Sagan