[HN Gopher] Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in...
___________________________________________________________________
Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children
Author : hampelm
Score : 198 points
Date : 2023-09-26 15:43 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| ccleve wrote:
| Pittenger is doing the most important work in this area. There is
| also a good clinic at Stanford.
|
| This is a good interview with Pittenger that give more detail on
| what his group is up to:
| https://aspire.care/clinicians/antibodies-pandas-bind-cins-a...
| colordrops wrote:
| I remember feeling pretty normal until I had a strep throat
| infection when I was 7, after which I got really introverted and
| twitchy/compulsive ever since. Maybe a coincidence but I
| sometimes wonder if that did something to me.
|
| edit: I swear I made this comment this before reading the
| article. It starts off with a boy at 7 with strep that got
| twitchy, which is 100% in line with my experience. Crazy.
| goda90 wrote:
| I'm curious how quickly you got on antibiotics, if at all. I
| had strep multiple times in my life, including tonsillitis that
| nearly hospitalized me one time. But my family was quick to
| spot the signs and get me treatment and I don't recognize any
| long term impact from it.
| colordrops wrote:
| Unfortunately I don't remember.
| CodeSgt wrote:
| I had a similar experience! I can't recall if it was strep or
| what, but I do remember a particularly nasty illness from which
| I never really feel I recovered from neurologically.
| bowsamic wrote:
| That is terrifying
| atonalfreerider wrote:
| I had strep as a child and I developed tics and compulsive
| speech. Also some OCD. I'm almost 40 and I still have the
| compulsive speech. When I have awkward thoughts, I start
| cursing under my breath.
|
| Another kid in my class has strep, and he has OCD so bad, that
| some days he can't leave the house.
| colordrops wrote:
| Same, I've got the very awkward thoughts and constant cursing
| under my breath as well. The twitchiness is still there but
| under much more control than when I was a child.
|
| I wonder if Tourette syndrome has anything to do with strep.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Wow weird, me too and never thought to connect it to strep.
| Any idea what about strep throat might be causing that?
| infecto wrote:
| PANDAS. Known condition and well documented.
| ericskiff wrote:
| Strep is the "S" in "PANDAS" - something about the strep
| infection seems to become resident in the brain causing the
| immune system to attack it. MRIs show a speckled
| inflammation in certain areas of the brains of kids with an
| active PANDAS symptoms / Strep infection.
|
| We worked with one of the pioneering doctors when our child
| was suffering, and she said their best theory is that there
| was a version of strep which caused Rheumatic Fever /
| Rheumatic heart infection, which affected many kids each
| year. Sometime in the 90's that dropped off, and then they
| started to see kids with strep infections and then sudden
| onset OCD, tics, mood lability, and sleep disorders.
|
| Her theory was that the strep which caused Rheumatic fever
| mutated to instead stay resident in the brain rather than
| the heart, and the immune system kept trying to attack it,
| especially when triggered by other stimuli like exposure to
| other colds, viruses, or allergies, leading to "flares" of
| the illness.
|
| We had a dramatic proof that the illness was related to our
| kid's symptoms when we discontinued the antibiotics and his
| symptoms flared terribly.
|
| Ultimately, we were able to achieve symptom reduction
| through a long course of antibiotics, tonsil removal (which
| seems related to the immune system's over-reaction in
| PANDAS cases), and a dramatic reduction of exposure to
| other illnesses while we all were in covid lockdown for
| years.
|
| I know other families who don't achieve acceptable symptom
| reduction move to IVIG after trying other treatments, and
| have found some success with that. I've also heard similar
| success stories from people with OCD/Tics following Lymes
| diagnosis who get IVIG.
|
| It may be worth seeing if you can find a doctor willing to
| examine the issues you're experiencing as a post-infection
| syndrome and discussing inflammation reduction protocols
| and other treatments.
| dartos wrote:
| I can't remember how I felt when I was <7 :(
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| EGreg wrote:
| Government and Corporations have been leading to a lot of these
| health issues for decades, including diabetes and obesity in
| children, ADHD from being locked in a prison-like school
| environment, and more. Incidentally, diabetes and obesity are
| major factors for morbidity in coronavirus infections.
|
| But also the for-profit industry finds it a lot more attractive
| to medicate kids downstream (eg prescribing Amphetamines for
| ADHD) and overdiagnose everything from Autism to ADHD to Gender
| Dysphoria. This is a band-aid approach, because it's harder and
| less profitable to change society than it is to medicate
| everyone.
|
| Hollywood definitely played a role in changing culture and
| people's behaviors (including Westerns glamorizing gunfighters,
| PR campaigns getting women to smoke, product placements, etc)
|
| But the industries actually start earlier than that.
| Merchandising selling stuff to kids. Broadcasting ideas -- kids
| love to pick up on what their peers are watching, not their
| parents.
|
| This PBS documentary goes intk detail:
|
| https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-merchants-cool/
|
| There are record levels of depression, sadness and suicidal
| ideation among teens, especially teen girls. Whether it's Hip-Hop
| or Tik-Tok, the negative externalities from the centralized, for-
| profit industries disseminating youth culture pile up and our
| communities should at least request the CDC to investigate
| further:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-experiencing-record-...
|
| They do this with adults too -- one in five middle aged women is
| on antidepressants. And let's not even get started on the opioid
| crisis. More people than ever are angry at "the other party" in
| many countries, it is not an accident.
|
| But they don't focus on culture and society and for-profit
| industries. They only focus on diffuse causes like a virus that's
| going around, or "random infections".
|
| State and Federal governments collude with industry to keep us
| distracted. Whether it's the fructose sugar they genetically
| engineer into the fruits, or the high-fructose corn syrup they
| put into everything, or water use, or the non-biodegradeable
| plastics, or the factory farms and overuse of antibiotics -- in
| nearly every case the government sides with the corporations --
| eg governments in agricultural US states criminalizing the
| filming and exposing of animal cruelty, since their tax revenue
| comes from these corporations -- or enforcing patents for
| Monsanto and Big Pharma etc. etc. and letting the lobbyists write
| Medicare Part D to make sure Medicare won't negotiate drug prices
| etc.
|
| What they do is they always tell us that we can do something as
| individuals (recycle, diet and exercise, go vegan etc) or lead to
| polarized narratives like Women (feminism) vs Men (redpill) White
| vs Black, so we'd be too divided and blaming each other instead
| of demanding systemic reforms to impose a cost on our
| corporations getting away with the negative externalities:
|
| https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
|
| I strongly believe that if we had a UBI in this country, funded
| by these pigovian taxes imposing costs, we'd have a population
| that organically would start to push industry towards healthier
| practices for everyone and the planet. Because the public would
| directly get the windfall of these tax revenues.
| markisus wrote:
| I wonder if these findings may partially explain the often
| derided theory that childhood vaccines can cause autism. The
| article directly mentions that an autism misdiagnosis can result
| from psychiatric symptoms resulting from an autoimmune response
| after certain infections.
| thicknavyrain wrote:
| The early research in support of this conclusion (despite the
| fact no subsequent research has born it out) was pure
| charlatanism, bad science and the theory is rightly derided
| because those who continue to propagate it do so out of naked
| self interest and financial gain:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I thought that theory was based on a fraudulent study?
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| I see your text is fading.
|
| Um sir, take your crack pot theories out of this post which
| provides evidence of a different previous crack pot theory.
|
| Science has no room for folks who don't preach the dogma.
| stephen_g wrote:
| The theory that there was never any actual evidence for? The
| only explanation for the theory as far as I know is fraud...
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| This opens up a can of worms since now the question is can a
| pregnant mom pass this down to an unborn child.
| genewitch wrote:
| No, you don't understand, "vaccines" are just biological agents
| now. They're no longer merely "weakened" forms of what we're
| trying to protect against. Don't you see? Vaccines can't cause
| this sort of injury, because they're not the disease!
|
| Definition of the word "vaccine": Nov, 2020: "Definition of
| vaccine: a preparation of killed microorganisms, living
| attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that
| is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to
| a particular disease"
|
| c.f. current definition: "Vaccine: b): a preparation of genetic
| material (such as a strand of synthesized messenger RNA) that
| is used by the cells of the body to produce an antigenic
| substance (such as a fragment of virus spike protein)"
|
| don't worry, i'm sure it doesn't mean anything.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _don 't worry, i'm sure it doesn't mean anything._
|
| It means we invented mRNA vaccines, which were never
| organisms of any kind. But they're clearly vaccines. Whatever
| dictionary you picked updated its definition accordingly.
| Strictly speaking, according to your "Nov, 2020" definition,
| smallpox is a cowpox vaccine. I think that's silly. I'd
| prefer a definition like:
|
| > vaccine (n): a substance that supplies antigenic
| information to the immune system to protect against a
| disease, while causing less harm than the disease that the
| vaccine immunises against.
| genewitch wrote:
| I submit that my problem with this is that mRNA
| therapeutics aren't vaccines, they're mRNA therapeutics.
| The word "Vaccine" comes from "cow" because of cowpox.
|
| Changing the definition so pfizer et al can rake in $50
| billion is what i take issue with. If they had said "This
| isn't a vaccine it's genetic modification" or whatever, no
| one would have signed up for it. It was a concentrated
| effort to change language. Control words, control thoughts
| - George Carlin was commenting on this in the 1990s!
|
| I am not the only one that takes issue with all of this
| crap.
| [deleted]
| idontwantthis wrote:
| > Such findings may have significance beyond a single obscure,
| debilitating illness. For they fit an intriguing, and growing,
| body of evidence that other kinds of psychiatric conditions might
| also result from infections
|
| Nobody tell Henry Cotton.
| fenesiistvan wrote:
| I woul look carefully to the pills that was subscribed to that
| infection.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| Hmm? The mechanism discussed here is the immune system
| attacking human cells during an immune response to strep. What
| do pills have to do with that, and do you mean antibiotics or
| do you mean psychiatric medications?
| fullmoon wrote:
| Are you thinking of antibiotics affecting the gut or about
| something else?
| all2 wrote:
| Seems like both the infection and the antibiotics could have
| an effect. You can't really count either out until further
| studies are performed.
| bregma wrote:
| I was on a length course of Doxycycline (for borreliosis). It
| had the side effect of acting as an antidepressant. I got
| better (from the borreliosis), the treatment ended, and so did
| the antidepressant effect. It may be a study of n=1 but
| antibiotics affect bacteria selectively, including gut
| bacteria. It could be that the H. pylori solution is pointing
| the way to greater things.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| And yet, despite mounting evidence, people are still opposing
| even _basic_ measures of hygiene in way too many schools. Air
| filters, if they are even present, are often just plugged out.
| Windows can 't be opened at all. Way too few loos for way too
| many students, most of them vandalized to hell, no soap
| dispensers to be seen.
|
| On top of that come all the parents who send their kid to school
| despite clearly being sick.
| comicjk wrote:
| There's also underfunded research on far-UV light, which at the
| right wavelengths kills pathogens without apparently affecting
| humans. It might really be that simple.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/could-uv-light-red...
|
| https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/new-type-ultraviolet-lig...
| version_five wrote:
| The scariest part of this is that it appears to be country
| dependent how seriously it is taken and how those presenting with
| symptoms are addressed. I have no idea if I'm in a pandas-
| accepting country, but knowing this now I'd certainly find a
| jurisdiction willing to entertain it's existence if my kids had
| symptoms. It shows how subjective and uncertain medicine really
| is.
| coding123 wrote:
| Hormones are generally regulated by our gut. When we introduce
| new species it affects who we are. Very interesting.
| broguinn wrote:
| There's some evidence that NAC can improve long COVID-like
| symptoms:
|
| https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/potential-new-treatme...
|
| Other than antibiotics to clear a lingering infection, are there
| interventions that we might take in the aftermath of bacterial or
| viral infection to remediate long-term effects?
| badcppdev wrote:
| This is sad: "years spent campaigning to get doctors to take the
| illnesses seriously."
|
| It's like that saying, "Capitalism: The worst economic system,
| except for all the others". Our medical system where we rely on
| individual doctors for primary care is really flawed but it's
| better than any alternatives that we have (or that we can afford
| anyway)
| baz00 wrote:
| Yup. _" well you're unlikely to have that at your age so go
| home and don't worry about it"_. I had it.
| notamy wrote:
| > or that we can afford anyway
|
| That's the big one in my experience. Functional medicine
| doctors are some miracle workers, but only if you can afford
| hundreds of dollars per visit / thousands of dollars in lab
| tests that insurance will never pay for.
| M1ch431 wrote:
| I recommend you check out the Direct Primary Care model and
| share your thoughts. This model is not to be confused with
| Concierge Medicine, which largely suffers from the same
| problems you identified about Functional Medicine doctors. I
| just commented about DPC, you can find my thoughts about it
| at the top of my profile.
|
| Overall, I think this is a great, affordable first step for
| redefining primary care - one that makes sense for doctors
| and patients, but is not a replacement for specialties like
| Functional Medicine.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The problem is more complicated than it sounds. The official
| treatment protocol for PANDAS is to perform a throat culture
| for strep and then treat with antibiotics if the result is
| positive. (Source:
| https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/pandas ). In other
| words, it's the same as normal treatment protocols for strep.
|
| The idea of PANDAS from occult (aka hidden, not producing
| positive test results) strep infections is less proven and
| considered rare, although it is mentioned in official treatment
| recommendations such as those above.
|
| The problem providers face is that some parents will read about
| PANDAS on the internet and assume it is the explanation for
| their child's problems, despite having negative throat culture.
| They jump from doctor to doctor demanding antibiotic treatment
| despite the negative test results, guided largely by their
| internet research. It's not hard to find PANDAS parent groups
| on Facebook or Reddit where someone can post vague symptoms and
| a chorus of group members will response "sounds like PANDAS".
|
| The difficult part is that for some of these patients, PANDAS
| _might_ be the right diagnosis. However, once a diagnosis
| becomes a cult favorite on the internet doctors get inundated
| with parents demanding antibiotics because their Facebook
| groups told them that 's what their child needs.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Our medical system where we rely on individual doctors for
| primary care is really flawed but it 's better than any
| alternatives that we have (or that we can afford anyway)_
|
| The US one I presume? Says who? Based on what metric? We can,
| and other countries have, do much better.
|
| That this parent "is "exhausted" by years spent campaigning to
| get doctors to take the illnesses seriously" doesn't say much.
|
| It's not like she had to go the public health system and didn't
| have the option to go on "individual doctors for primary care"
| if she could afford it (in fact it would have been way more
| affordable than in the US).
|
| She campaigned to spread awareness for the cause, not for them
| to treat her own special case.
|
| Second, the average person would be much more exhausted when
| chacing their own (or kid's) treatment trying to afford
| hellishly expensive treatment in the US, sacrificing their kids
| college fund or their own pension (or even ending in bankruptcy
| (CNBC: "Two-thirds of people who file for bankruptcy say
| medical bills or other issues related to illness contributed to
| their financial downfall").
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The US one I presume? Says who? Based on what metric? We
| can, and other countries have, do much better.
|
| The article is about UK doctors not recognizing PANDAS as a
| real illness.
|
| They even quote one doctor who refused to treat "an American
| illness".
|
| The US NIH has a page on PANDAS and our (US) diagnostic and
| treatment recommendations here:
| https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/pandas
|
| If you wanted an example of "US healthcare bad" then this is
| not it. The article is about UK doctors not recognizing a
| condition and the activities in Parliament to address the
| situation.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The article is about UK doctors not recognizing PANDAS
| as a real illness._
|
| I know, I read it before commenting.
|
| I'm not saying the article is about the US system. I'm
| saying the comment I responded to appeared to say that the
| US system is better, and how those countries with other
| systems like the UK have it bad.
|
| "Doctors not recognizing X as a real illness" can happen,
| and has, anywhere. It's not a result of how the medical
| system is structured with regard to public/private,
| universal healthcare or not, and so on.
|
| There is no shortage of stories from the US about doctors
| refusing to take some illness or condition as real that was
| later proven otherwise (or vise versa), dismissing patient
| concerns that were later proven, and so on.
| danzer420 wrote:
| which countries have a different system than individual
| doctors for primary care, and how is it better?
| anonymoushn wrote:
| I think in most countries people don't have to ask their
| PCP for permission to see the proper specialist. I don't
| have much other basis for comparison because I don't think
| I've ever met any PCP more than once anyway.
| ksenzee wrote:
| The Canadian system absolutely requires a referral from
| your GP to see a specialist. And even in the US, when you
| do have insurance that allows you to see a specialist
| without a referral, there are some specialists who won't
| see you without a referral anyway, I assume because they
| don't want to deal with random people off the street.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Japan has a 'go to any specialist nearby and be seen'
| system. Very few GP's, and a multitude of specialists for
| their own area of expertise.
|
| I had my pick of three ortholaryngologists today (all of
| them less than ideal according to reviews, but they were
| there).
| bowsamic wrote:
| I don't understand why doctors are so dismissive and mean
| people
| fragmede wrote:
| Emotional fatigue.
| M1ch431 wrote:
| I've commented on the past on Direct Primary Care practices -
| it's a different model of care that is rapidly growing; you can
| read my previous thoughts on this model here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33682407
|
| I largely think that doctors, especially primary care doctors,
| are being limited/held hostage by the insurance companies and
| the health care corporations that they work for.
|
| They are not reaping the profits from the care they give, and
| can't focus because of patient loads being way too high. As it
| was explained to me by my doctor, this is because of how
| insurance companies pay out (per visit, no matter the duration)
| and the places that employ doctors usually expect that they see
| a certain volume of patients. Most doctors have a large amount
| of student loan debt, and usually feel helpless to fight
| against it - starting a new practice is very costly.
|
| Once you really look into how oppressive/restrictive the system
| is to our doctors, the issue with our health care becomes
| pretty clear. People can't get timely, accurate care -- they
| have to wait for most prescriptions (because as long as doctors
| take insurance, they cannot fill medications), and they are
| always guessing (fearing might be more apt) how much a
| particular medication, test, or scan will eventually cost,
| causing hesitancy to seek out care. And most importantly, no
| longer do patients (or their doctor) have to worry if their
| insurance company will cover XYZ medication or treatment under
| this model of care.
|
| My doctor negotiated with a local lab company, and that company
| offers my doctor's patients pretty much any test at-cost - this
| is another business dealing that is restricted by insurance
| companies.
|
| DPC takes all the mystery out (I pay $45 a month for this
| service, all visits are free): all common
| procedures/lab/scan/medication costs are up on the website
| (they are very reasonable/wholesale/at-cost), and I don't have
| to fight to get that information; I don't have to fight to get
| an appointment, I can text/email/etc. my doctor whenever and
| get a prompt response. Because he limits the amount of patients
| he sees this is possible.
|
| I think if primary care was overall something like this model,
| but perhaps a bit more accessible (more doctors practicing this
| way); not only would a lot of illness be treated before it is
| chronic, people would be less afraid to seek care out, and
| hospitals and specialists would be less overloaded.
| ericskiff wrote:
| For any parents reading this and wondering if their kid is
| affected, I highly recommend reading up on PANS and PANDAS.
|
| Watching our happy, healthy kid change before our eyes with
| sudden-onset OCD, vocal and motor tics, terrible mood lability
| and sleep issues, and other strange symptoms like handwriting
| regression was heartbreaking.
|
| His doctor suggested it was Tourette's and I happened to notice
| that his symptoms included a dry vocal "cough" and insisted on
| him being tested for strep, which he had. We got the antibiotic
| and it went away. That cycle happened 2 times until the 3rd time,
| the symptoms persisted and he no longer had strep. That lead me
| to discover PANDAS and we then began getting him treated for
| that.
|
| If you've noticed similar changes in your kids, definitely read
| up on it and find a doctor who understands the link and is
| willing to explore treatment options with you.
| ekanes wrote:
| Very similar story over here. Similar treatment and recovery,
| BH. For people curious about this syndrome, the most salient
| symptom is a sudden onset of multiple things that people don't
| usually develop in later childhood, let alone all at once.
| (OCD, tics, etc)
| s0kr8s wrote:
| I have been told that kids with PANS / PANDAS often get
| better spontaneously when they hit puberty as well, which
| some speculate is due to changes in the immune system that
| occur at that phase of development (the body stops producing
| T-cells), so there is hope for families that have young
| children that things can improve gradually with time on their
| own if you hang in there as well.
| ericskiff wrote:
| I realized I didn't finish the story on this comment.
|
| 5 years later, our son's recovery is a daily miracle. He's a
| happy, healthy 13 year old with only a shadow of his former
| symptoms.
|
| We were able to achieve symptom reduction through long course
| antibiotics, inflammation reduction supplements and medications
| (Tylenol and steroid bursts), and eventually having his
| tonsil's out. After that we would have done IVIG if needed.
|
| We maintain some inflammation reduction supplements but he's
| off the rest of the meds and doing really remarkably, knock on
| wood. If you're going through this with your kid, I send you
| all the love in the world, and hope that you're able to relieve
| their symptoms as well.
| 0ccupied wrote:
| What inflammation reduction supplements did you use?
| ericskiff wrote:
| Turmeric extract (ehanza), vitamin-d, omega, and Advil
| during flares.
| ekanes wrote:
| Very interesting. We're on long-course Keflex
| (cephalexin) and 2 Aleve daily.
| dosplatos wrote:
| Not the happiest news I've read (and somewhat poorly written for
| a paywalled article).
|
| Don't viruses and bacteria alter genetic expression? Usually it's
| just hijacking certain cellular organelles to replicate, but it
| makes sense this or other processes could trigger genetic
| expressions with longer lasting affects.
|
| Really unfortunate to think that it's some sort of dice roll when
| you catch an infection.
| hampelm wrote:
| https://archive.ph/SXQVB
| cloudquelle wrote:
| When I was around 12 or 13, I had the Epstein-Barr virus.
|
| For a couple of *months* I couldn't: - Walk straight. Always
| looked like I was completely drunk - Speak normally. Each word I
| spoke was only half-finished and I had to _constantly_ re-
| pronounce any words again and again - Write on paper. I just
| couldn't write a single sentence, it just didn't work. I had
| practically lost the "precision " of any movements
|
| Not to mention the constant headache and pain in the throat.
|
| I am wondering why it lasted that long and if it had left any
| sort of permanent effects.
| zhivota wrote:
| I had it at 16, and like you I was down for a month. Barely
| could do anything - I don't recall bad mental effects but
| physically I was zero energy for a long time. I feel like my
| constitution never really recovered. Even today I get bouts of
| illness unlike anyone else my age or in my family, and I'm
| otherwise a very healthy person (healthy weight, work out
| regularly, etc.).
|
| I never really thought about it until the long COVID
| discussions and learning more about things like this, but it
| really is something people barely understand today.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| Unfortunately it has not gotten the attention it deserves from
| the medical community. Their consensus is that you only get it
| once(generally). I've had 3 documented cases, the last in 2019,
| and that one put me out of commission for basically an entire
| month. I'm hopeful that future medicine eliminates this disease
| entirely.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Interesting how this topic is discussed now. After lock downs,
| spending most time afront of screen, without socialising with
| other, constantly breeding with catastrophic scenarios withou any
| hope for future... In some countries even with forcing to take
| vaccines that do more harm to children than covid itself.
|
| We should seriously ask if we do it for our children protection
| or fear from propaganda.
| okokwhatever wrote:
| Nothing that a good vaccine cannot fix.
| EricE wrote:
| Or miracle pill!
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| [flagged]
| drewhiggins wrote:
| The Economist is very well known and reputable international
| newspaper that has existed for over 100 years
| John23832 wrote:
| I hope that is sarcasm:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist
| s0kr8s wrote:
| Long-time HN lurker here, and I think it's finally time to
| finally create a profile and post my first comment.
|
| I'm the CEO of an outpatient mental health organization with 50+
| employees (mostly just run the tech in the background these
| days), I have been a professional in the field for 18 years in a
| wide variety of settings, and two of my four children have
| intermittently had symptoms that match the description of PANDAS
| / PANS for the past four years. Happy, gentle kids prior to it,
| often complemented in public for their good manners, then sudden
| onset for both of them after a Step-A infection, starting with
| neurological signs (occular shudder), then Berserker-level
| constant violence afterwards.
|
| What is most maddening for parents is how powerless the whole
| experience leaves you feeling. I know this field, had worked with
| kids with these symptoms in a professional setting where I was
| widely viewed as the most successful clinician they had ever
| seen, I leveraged every asset I had to try and get my kids help
| (called up a family favor with the owner of a Children's
| hospital) and STILL the response from the hospital was to say
| that there was nothing wrong with my children, everything they
| were seeing was simply "behavioral," report me to child
| protection, and accuse me of Munchausen's. Close family members
| concluded my wife and I were child abusers when we asked them for
| help, and ran for the hills as soon as they got a glimpse of what
| was actually going on.
|
| At the end of the day, the reality of PANS / PANDAS is even
| possible is not something that anyone is prepared to handle. That
| an innocent child could suddenly be turned into a violent weapon
| of mass destruction at any moment in time at the drop of a hat is
| a notion from a zombie apocalypse movie, not reality. Zombie
| apocalypse movies are actually the best possible way to imagine
| what it is like to live with a child with PANS / PANDAS,
| including the intermittent groaning biting.
|
| To give you a clinician's perspective, when I was a young
| clinician working with these kids, we didn't believe it either.
| Neuro-autoimmune disorders were not even on the map back then,
| and we were always told to assume that some sort of trauma was
| underlying the violent behavior, because what else could possibly
| drive someone to do those things? Parents would tell me, "but
| this came on suddenly, out of nowhere, they were a happy normal
| kid before," and we would just assume they were lying, clueless,
| or some combination of the two because we could never definitely
| rule out that some sort of awful trauma had happened. Sure, these
| kids never responded well to known trauma treatments, which
| definitely suggested something additional was amiss, but then
| again there has always been a subgroup of individuals with
| complex trauma who do not respond well to treatment, so...
|
| Now that I am a parent, however, and these are my own kids, I can
| with a high degree of confidence rule out trauma as a diagnosis
| in a way that I never could back then. My kids are home-schooled
| so it's not like we missed some sort of bullying at school, my
| wife and I are both professional mental health therapists so we
| know every parenting and behavioral conditioning trick in the
| book, I'm moderately wealthy and can afford to provide them with
| anything they need, and yet still the violent behavior continues,
| in complete defiance of everything I was ever taught. I sincerely
| wish I could apologize somehow to all those families I worked
| with way back when...
|
| One of the things that makes me the most angry is the fact that
| the mental health system I work in is complicit in maintaining
| the illusion that they can help these kids. Occasionally someone
| will observe one of my kids acting out and will say "you should
| take your kids to see a therapist," as if a little routine
| behavioral insight could get this all fixed up in a jiffy. And if
| you took such a child to a therapist, they would probably be
| happy to attempt useless interventions on these children for
| years (hopefully not at my business, but perhaps even there), but
| the truth is that the world of mental health has nothing to offer
| these children. Zero, other than perhaps some palliative care for
| the trauma of going through and endless waking nightmare and
| perhaps some slightly nicer containment and quarantining
| facilities than you might have in your own home. I've worked in
| the settings where these children tend to accumulate and for the
| most part they simply don't...get...better. Why? Maybe because
| the core problem is not "behavioral," but with therapy being "so
| hot right now," nobody can seem to tolerate the notion that it's
| not a panacea for everything.
|
| For those of you who have posted comments about your own
| experiences with children with PANS / PANDAS, I commend your
| courage and determination to continue pursuing ways to help your
| kids in spite of the resistance and the absolutely terrible
| advice the world has likely given you on how to help them. Know
| that you're not alone. It seems like every time I tell my story
| to someone, they know someone who is going through the same
| thing. It's possible that the frequency and prevalence of this
| problem is actually increasing over time, but we don't have good
| numbers on what exactly is happening because most of the world is
| still busy denying that the problem exists. I am consequently
| glad to see this issue getting more mainstream traction, both in
| the Economist and on HackerNews.
|
| Side-note: like with most things involving the brain, I think we
| are unfortunately still a long way from understanding how PANS /
| PANDAS actually works. We have some theories, but those theories
| tend to not hold up well in studies (which is why PANDAS was
| renamed PANS to broaden the range of possible etiologies) but
| likely the syndrome is complex and multidimensional, with a wide
| variety of pathways leading to a similar endpoint (including
| pathways that don't even involve the immune system), sort of like
| Autism. So don't assume that there is a simple answer either.
| There are lots of stories about things like antibiotics or IVIG
| helping, but they don't work for everyone and each case is likely
| to require a slightly different approach, so the more important
| thing is to never give up and commit yourself to a systematic
| process of trial and error until you find something that works
| for your kids and your family. If you can, get some medical-grade
| genetic testing done, teach yourself some rudimentary
| bioinformatics, then put your tech skills to good use by mining
| that CRAM file for gold. That process led to tremendously helpful
| insights and intervention strategies for my family that would
| never have been uncovered otherwise.
| NeuroCoder wrote:
| Met a kid with this my first pediatric clerkship in med school. I
| was told it was super rare and then had to memorize a bunch more
| stuff and forgot all the details about the visit. Always wish I
| could remember that patient better
| derbOac wrote:
| I've seen multiple cases like this professionally, and they
| don't always have the typical PANDAS profile, either in terms
| of sequelae or putative causes. Kid gets illness, very clear
| signs (very high temperature for example), sometimes admitted,
| dramatic personality change afterward. The cases I remember
| most were around 7-12 but I recall one that was more around the
| age of 17.
|
| It was unnerving for multiple reasons the first time I worked
| on these types of cases; one of those types of experiences that
| made me realize there's a fair amount of very serious illness
| out there that "goes under the radar" in the sense that there's
| serious consequences and little to no way to prevent it and
| poor understanding afterward of exactly what happened.
| goda90 wrote:
| It seems that the Sci-fi future of medicine is one where we can
| closely understand what the immune system is doing and manipulate
| it.
| tabtab wrote:
| A fight against a virus is _all-out war_ in the body. In any
| big war, there will be significant collateral damage. The body
| has to "bomb" brain and nerve cells to kill infected cells,
| and obviously if you have enough of them taken out, it will
| have lasting impact on your function.
|
| Some grow back, some don't, and even those that grow back need
| to be retrained. For those that don't grow back, other cells
| and body parts have to learn to compensate.
|
| Please keep up on your inoculations.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| I found the NIMH factsheet on PANDAS very clear and comprehensive
| [1]. If this article is relevant to you, I suggest reading it
| too. Summary:
|
| Children who have strep sometimes develop psychiatric symptoms as
| well. This is a condition called PANDAS[2]. The characteristics
| signs are tics, OCD-like symptoms, and anxiety, occurring in
| children roughly ages 3-12. The symptoms usually occur suddenly,
| "overnight".
|
| So, the action is: If a child develops this sort of psychiatric
| illness, get them tested for strep, and possibly treat them for
| strep before the psychiatric condition. And awareness among
| doctors is low, so you might need to be the one to identify the
| condition and advocate for it to get treated.
|
| The suspected mechanism is the immune system attacking human
| cells during an immune system response to stress. Some other
| commenters are discussing psychiatric responses to long COVID,
| schizophrenic-like symptoms, and effects of PANDAS on adults.
| There's also something called PANS for kids getting psychiatric
| conditions from infections that aren't STREP. This is very
| interesting to me too but the research still seems murky enough
| to not have an obvious course of action.
|
| [1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/pandas
|
| [2] The expanded acronym is very long: Pediatric Autoimmune
| Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated w/ Streptococcal Infections
| kouru225 wrote:
| Honestly I feel like the science community's disregard for
| religion has caused them to completely fail at dealing with human
| psychology. Science has spent the last 1.5 centuries presenting
| itself as a counterpoint to religion, but they fail to understand
| that religion is just an early attempt at talking about the
| subconscious.
|
| So the science community continually misidentifies issues
| stemming from the subconscious as pseudoscience. Jung was right.
| dartos wrote:
| What a wild comment
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I reject your sweeping statement "science has spent the last
| 1.5 centuries presenting itself as a counterpoint to religion."
|
| Science is a process of trying to explain why things as they
| are and to predict how things will behave in the future. Many
| (in ye olden days nearly all) scientists have been religious.
| There is a conflict only when the two come to different
| explanations of the same thing. That conflict wasn't the goal
| of science, unlike what you seem to imply.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I don't think I was implying that science intended to reject
| religion. I don't think it matters what the scientific
| community intended though. Currently, science socially
| functions as a rejection of religion regardless of what the
| leaders of the scientific community think or say, and that
| social function results a bias against subconscious issues
| for the reason I explained in my other comments. The reasons
| why science functions that way are probably way too long and
| complicated to list (and probably are the result politics
| more than anything else), but you can't tell me that that's
| not true. The majority of the world think that science and
| religion are clashing forces, and it's a self-fulfilling
| prophecy.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| > The majority of the world think that science and religion
| are clashing forces, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
|
| That is really a broad claim. Science isn't one thing and
| religion isn't one thing. Both are clouds of
| ideas/claims/customs and there is some overlap. I'd argue
| that most of the time there is no conflict at all and most
| people don't perceive it as a "clash".
|
| There will always be people who will say that we shouldn't
| have invented airplanes -- God would have given us wings if
| he wanted man to fly, but they are in the minority. Most of
| the time, there is a news item that "science" has invented
| a battery anode that results in a battery with 20% more
| capacity and people cheer it and don't think it stepped on
| God's toes. Religious people will say that God wishes for
| us to not eat meat on certain days and nobody looks to
| science to see if that is true or not.
|
| Stephen Jay Gould was famous for his "non-overlapping
| magisteria" claim [1] -- which I'm arguing is true most of
| the time, but also see that Gould was painting way too
| broadly as there certainly are cases where the two are in
| conflict.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
| overlapping_magisteria
| dylan604 wrote:
| This is stated as if religion has never had it's own pseudo-
| science/medicine beliefs that conflicted with actual issues.
| "we don't know what's going on, so it must be a possession"
| type of things when it could have been something more more like
| schizophrenia or some other medical condition.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I never said religion was correct. I said that science tries
| so hard to differentiate itself from religion that it labels
| anything that doesn't appear to be logical as pseudoscience.
| Since the subconscious isn't logical, subconscious issues get
| ignored.
| elwell wrote:
| > "we don't know what's going on, so it must be a possession"
| type of things when it could have been something more more
| like schizophrenia or some other medical condition.
|
| Maybe the spiritual representation is more 'accurate'. Is the
| concept of love more useful or the concept of oxytocin?
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Is the concept of love more useful or the concept of
| oxytocin?
|
| are we trying to make someone feel better about themself or
| cure the problem?
| barrysteve wrote:
| The science community often includes religious people.
|
| Jung may be right. He wasn't out to prove "science" wrong. He
| did his own thing.
|
| I haven't seen many people outside Richard Dawkins, Lawrence
| Krauss and Neil Degrasse seriously try and blame religion for
| scientific failings.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| So I'm unclear based on the article and some other reading
| around, can a strep test detect PANDAS, at least in some cases?
| ekanes wrote:
| PANDAS is better described as a syndrome of symptoms all
| occurring at once. It's caused by strep (and in our case at
| least) can also be triggered by covid vaccines or other things
| as well) so a strep text only tells you if the child has strep.
| In our case, the treatment was the test, in that if it didn't
| work, it would (arguably) help rule it out. But it did work,
| for which we're grateful.
| s0kr8s wrote:
| According to the conventional PANDAS theory, due to
| biological mimickry antibodies against Step A bind to neurons
| and attack them, so there are antibody tests that focus on
| Strep A that are used as diagnostic tools in PANDAS, such as
| antistreptolysin O (ASO), anti-DNAse B (ADB), and
| streptococcal carbohydrate (anti-CHO).
|
| However, there a lots of kids diagnosed with PANDAS who have
| high levels of those antibodies at some times but not at
| others, and there are kids with the exact same history and
| presentation who never show high levels of those antibodies
| at all. So it could be that there are actually a wide variety
| of situations in which antibodies that the body creates end
| up attacking neurons (see anti-NMDA encephalitis), and only
| some of them are even known about yet.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| > Dr Pittenger says it is now clear that covid-19 infections can
| trigger psychosis, fatigue and other neuro-psychiatric symptoms.
| A misbehaving immune system is thought to be the culprit. The
| idea that schizophrenia may, at least sometimes, likewise be an
| auto-immune disorder is also under investigation.
|
| Until I got long covid(generally recovered now after 2 years), I
| couldn't comprehend this idea. I felt like I was actually going
| crazy. But then that lead me down a rabbit hole of reading about
| things like the microbiome and immune system which is a whole new
| domain yet to be formally explored. I highly recommend people
| read Ed Yong's book "I Contain Multitudes".
|
| Post acute infection syndromes are a real thing and it is
| fascinating that we get to see science take on this topic in the
| spotlight right now. Especially Jeff Gordon and his work on the
| microbiome and Akiko Iwasaki and her work on long covid.
|
| It makes you honestly question the idea of freewill. Good thing
| that Robert Sapolsky's new book is coming out next month on the
| topic!
| all2 wrote:
| I remember reading awhile back about a study that showed people
| with the flu are generally more social while the virus is
| spreading. There's also those nasty sugar cravings that seem to
| pop up when people diet, and it may be that the microbiome
| drives those cravings. It's a curious thing to think that the
| bugs in our bodies may drive our impulses.
| genewitch wrote:
| I don't know the mechanism of the flu thing (and i have heard
| it, after you get infected you're more social until the virus
| confines you to bed), but the craving sugar thing is 100% gut
| biome, the grass-fed gut flora release opioids when they eat
| grass, which get sent, via the blood, to our brains, which
| make us feel good. not eating grasses means we go through
| opiate withdrawal!
| Aurornis wrote:
| > not eating grasses means we go through opiate withdrawal!
|
| That's an unreasonable exaggeration. Nobody is getting
| significant opioid modulation and withdrawals from their
| microbiome.
| genewitch wrote:
| And ketchup doesn't have enough nicotine in it, even when
| applied to potatoes, to notice!
| reilly3000 wrote:
| This is fascinating. I wanted to know more about that but
| my cursory searches didn't turn up anything except for
| connections between opioid use and gut microbes. It
| certainly feels like withdrawal!
| genewitch wrote:
| oh, i get downvoted every time i bring this up on any
| social media platform that supports downvoting. see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37129256 for
| example.
|
| I'm not sure where all of my research PDFs wound up over
| the last 20 years, but start with that DOI (
| 10.1016/0014-5793(92)80414-C ) from 1992(!).
|
| There's a trend to looking into the gut for causes of
| certain diseases. Prior to the pandemic, there were
| publications that Alzheimer's, for example, was linked to
| gut biome.
|
| I get the downvotes, what i say goes against conventional
| wisdom, that all you gotta do to lose weight is "not eat
| so much" - but the human body is not just your brain and
| heart and some tooling to allow intake of fuel as food.
|
| There's a growing (and, depending on your views of
| "life", alarming) sense that our guts are in more control
| than we think. This can cause a lot of "free-willers" to
| get upset and be reactionary.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > remember reading awhile back about a study that showed
| people with the flu are generally more social while the virus
| is spreading.
|
| Am I an idiot or is this clearly non-causal?
| dylan604 wrote:
| does seem weird as the flu usually makes me sore and not
| want to move at all.
| someuser2345 wrote:
| I assume the poster meant that the infected are more
| social before they start having symptoms
| jacobn wrote:
| You're probably contagious before symptom onset.
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| You're probably still contagious for a while after the
| symptoms weaken.
|
| But thinking about it, you're also probably in a good
| mood at the same time. So yeah, of course you're going to
| be more sociable.
| sp332 wrote:
| To clarify, the the claim is that individuals are more
| sociable when they are infected with the flu virus.
|
| _These results show that there is an immediate active
| behavioral response to infection before the expected onset
| of symptoms or sickness behavior._
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20816312/
| gruez wrote:
| I did a quick skim and the main problems with the study
| are:
|
| 1. no placebo, so it's unclear whether it was actually
| due to the flu virus or some unrelated factor. The study
| admits this might be an issue, but casually dismisses it
| with "We looked for this, and found no such effects."
|
| 2. the "flu virus" in question is actually a vaccine.
| Needless to say there's a big difference between getting
| a flu shot and an actual flu.
| dylan604 wrote:
| the idea that a virus can change the behavior of the host to
| make it more likely to spread is one of those things that's
| beyond creepy. lots of scifi based on this, and the ones that
| are more subtle are much more effective than getting bit by a
| zombie trope.
| lemming wrote:
| This is already well established in humans for
| toxoplasmosis, for example. It's a parasite rather than a
| virus, but it doesn't seem crazy that a virus might do
| similar things.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Have I got bad news for you. This is past speculation in
| certain species:
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/cordycep
| s...
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Also in humans, with the rabies virus which makes people
| be repulsed by water, which would limit the spread of the
| virus since its vector is saliva.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean this is something well proven in parasitic
| infections. For example snails that climb to the top of
| plants to be eaten by birds when they are infected.
|
| Also rats that are infected that go hang about places where
| cats have peed so they get ate spreading the infection to
| cats.
| dylan604 wrote:
| what makes you think that this is something I doubt? I
| can accept it happens and still be creeped out by it all
| the same.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| > It makes you honestly question the idea of freewill. Good
| thing that Robert Sapolsky's new book is coming out next month
| on the topic!
|
| Watching someone go through certain kinds of dementia can have
| a similar effect. Simplify the input and make situations
| repeatable (from their perspective) on very-short timeframes
| and it's hard not to notice how much we behave like automatons.
| It's being able to hold a lot of context that makes us seem
| like we're ordinarily not, I reckon.
| WesternWind wrote:
| Prior to getting into tech, I had an internship at the NY State
| Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) where I did work helping people
| developing assessment tools for schizophrenic prodromes (people
| before they develop schizophrenia), as they were working on a
| predictive assessment questionaire.
|
| Basically they were looking for risk factors but also to
| predict who might actually develop the disease imminently among
| those at risk, because if you monitor folks at risk, folks who
| might have subclinical symptoms, and can know who is going to
| have a psychotic break, you can manage and control it and have
| much better outcomes.
|
| The largest predictive factor of folks who were at increased
| risk of developing schizophrenia is if they have a family
| history of it as I recall. Stress, in a variety of forms, is
| also a big factor.
|
| However the reason I write is because I remember that late fall
| and winter conception of the individual has been shown to
| create a small but statistically significant increase in the
| likelihood of developing the disease. It's unclear exactly why,
| but one theory is that increased risk of viral infection for
| the mother during certain stages of pregnancy may be a factor.
|
| Teasing apart these sort of facotrs, even to the extent
| possible often requires complex multivariate analysis of
| general and clinical populations and either time based or
| retrospective analysis of risk factors. Even then the
| mechanisms are fairly opaque.
|
| Covid infection may lead to increased understanding of
| psychotic and subpsychotic disorders, but it's more likely to
| simply complicate any analysis; just teasing apart the actual
| effects of the disease and the stress that results from the
| social changes necessary to contain it, in terms of development
| of mental illness, may not be fully possible.
| whats_a_quasar wrote:
| Related: "Treating the Prodrome", a discussion about early
| treatment of schizophrenia and some speculation about
| possible mechanisms. [1]
|
| This sort of work is very exciting to me! Treating
| schizophrenia early seems like a win for everyone - less of
| an impact on the individual, less of a need for
| antipsychotics, and less societal impact.
|
| I've also seen some speculation about a prodrome for major
| depression, with a period characterized by anxiety or
| agitation before a full episode. Early detection of
| psychiatric episodes seems like a really ripe approach.
|
| [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/20/treat-the-prodrome/
| s0kr8s wrote:
| Recent research suggests that schizophrenia may also be
| immune-mediated or at least immune-system involved. See:
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.8805.
| ..
|
| I was at a psychiatric conference once where the presenter
| highlighted that the last condition that psychiatry actually
| "cured" was neurosyphilis, an infection-triggered version of
| schizophrenia, back in the 1940's.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| I believe there was a RadioLab episode that discussed
| schizophrenia and reduced thermoregulation. Very interesting;
| it explained why some schizophrenic people wear lots a
| clothes (a phenomenon one might notice out on the city
| streets). Could also be used as an early diagnostic tool.
| gejose wrote:
| The parent comment mentions Robert Sapolsky and I can't resist
| linking a talk where he explores various physical and
| environmental factors that influence human actions -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRYcSuyLiJk
|
| If anyone finds the video above interesting, also check out his
| Behavioural Biology lecture series on YouTube -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...
|
| His upcoming book can be found here -
| https://www.amazon.ca/Determined-Science-Life-without-Free/d...
| diogenes4 wrote:
| > It makes you honestly question the idea of freewill.
|
| Hell two months in any psychology course will have you
| questioning that. We are truly biological beings first and
| rational agents second.
| nvahalik wrote:
| The middle ground here seems not only theologically sound but
| biologically coherent as well. We have a constrained will.
|
| Free will has never and will never exist since we are finite
| beings. We have a _constrained_ will that is boxed in by a
| number of factors: time, money, biology, knowledge,
| circumstances, etc. Theologically, that will is also
| constrained by our nature. There are certain spiritual things
| we cannot do in the same way we cannot do certain physical
| things.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| By the time your internal monologue makes a decision, the
| neural network for it fired long ago. Non-physical thoughts
| don't guide the physical processes; they are simply a side
| effect of it.
| jeroen wrote:
| Did you learn anything that helped in your recovery? I'm 1.5
| years in and nowhere near a full recovery yet.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Would recommend CBT.
|
| e: I'm downvoted but this is one of the only treatments with
| best-in-class evidence for its effectiveness in treating long
| covid as well as CFS and IBS. The body is a complex organism.
| jinder wrote:
| Where is the best-in-class evidence that CBT is effective
| at treating long covid and chronic fatigue syndrome?
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| This is a very, very tall claim:
|
| _this is one of the only treatments with best-in-class
| evidence_
|
| Firstly, one would expect to see indications of the
| evidence for cognitive behavioral therapy working for a
| complex long-term illness with multiple documented
| physiological issues.
|
| Random paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article
| /pii/S089662732...
|
| Second, which class of evidence are you referring to?
|
| Third, to back the comparison in the claim you also need to
| present the lack of evidence for other treatments. This
| makes your claim very, very tall.
| fragmede wrote:
| I'm in the US, so this advice is only applicable there, but
| LabCorp will test your blood for you without a doctor's note.
| I had to route around my doctor because I caught covid in the
| initial wave and no one knew what was going on. Your doctor
| may be able to help you more these days. Anyway, so I got my
| blood tested for all sorts of stuff, fixed deficiencies that
| came up, then leaned heavily on specialists to get medication
| to fix my symptoms. Beta blockers/other for my heart
| palpitations/other issues from a cardiologist, various
| inhalers for my lung issues from a pulmonologist, a whole
| slew of medications and treatments from a psychiatrist. And
| so much help from my friends. At the worst of it, it was
| exhausting walking from my bedroom to the kitchen, and I live
| in a small apartment. It did take years, but eventually I got
| there.
|
| Learning to never push myself, because that would cause me to
| relapse and spend a week in bed. They have a name for it now,
| but that's the biggest thing that helped, really.
|
| Hope you get a full recovery soon!
| ck425 wrote:
| Was about to ask the same. I'm one year in and had a glorious
| month following reinfection in August but seem to have
| rebounded the last week or two.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I sure did. I'm writing a book on it right now. I have a
| couple of posts that might help:
|
| https://jondouglas.dev/long-covid/ (Maybe outdated at this
| point but tells the full journey)
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LongHaulersRecovery/comments/12iv4p.
| .. (Probably the most realistic summary)
|
| The most important thing in my opinion that I don't talk
| about in these posts is to stay informed on the latest
| research and become study/trial literate. i.e.
| https://www.science.org/content/article/how-seriously-
| read-s...
|
| Wishing you the best to recover.
| cempaka wrote:
| I think it's really a shame that aspirin is not emphasized
| more as a COVID and COVID-recovery treatment, given that
| it's known to help reduce clotting which is an important
| mechanism of COVID etiology. Even Biden's physician had him
| take it during his case.
| hinkley wrote:
| There was a medical article the other day that popped up where
| a daughter received the first kidney transplant without life-
| long anti-rejection drugs. Instead they reprogrammed her immune
| system to see her mother's tissue as self instead of foreign
| body. She was on anti-rejection meds for months instead of
| life. I presume so they could test whether their plan worked or
| not.
|
| If they can do that for life or death situations, I have hope
| that we can refine the process for other auto-immune diseases
| that are everything from lifestyle threatening up to life-
| threatening. My issues are middle of the list, but if arthritis
| had a solution other than immunosuppression while I still have
| cartilage, that would make me so happy.
|
| And I'd really like to be able to eat croissants and baklava
| again, if that can be arranged.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >It makes you honestly question the idea of freewill.
|
| Not eating and getting low blood sugar can much more simply
| answer the question of "Do I have free will, or am I a subject
| of my internal chemical reactions".
|
| Or, much more simply stated "You're not you when you are
| hungry".
| mistersquid wrote:
| > Not eating and getting low blood sugar can much more simply
| answer the question of "Do I have free will, or am I a
| subject of my internal chemical reactions".
|
| You cannot control what you feel, but you can control your
| actions.
| neongodzilla wrote:
| You have clearly never met someone having a hypoglycemic
| event. It can absolutely change their personality, as
| significantly as a head injury.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| Hyperglycemia does too. (High blood sugar.) It's known as
| _diabetic rage_. A number of things are happening there.
| Part of it is brain inflammation - experienced as
| suffering - and brain inflammation is directly behavior-
| modifying, causing aggression.
|
| And indeed that's what happens with traumatic brain
| injuries.
|
| The same mechanism is behind the aggression sometimes
| displayed by cocaine users. Cocaine tamps down brain
| inflammation short-term, increases it long-term.
|
| And indeed, people with traumatic brain injuries and
| central nervous system inflammation tend to have more
| problems with cocaine abuse.
| jaggederest wrote:
| The sound of breaking dishes in the kitchen, a trail of
| damaged but unopened candy wrappers, sitting on the floor
| next to the cabinets with their doors ripped off, with
| the sugar bowl half-spilled, thankfully recovering with
| some sugar under their tongue and no major bodily injury.
| Terrifying.
| cja wrote:
| ADHD...
| [deleted]
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| In theory that sounds great. Unfortunately the idea that
| humans are highly rational is over rated. We are first and
| foremost, for better or worse, emotional beings.
|
| Your fame of mind (i.e., feelings) plays a role in decision
| making, which drives action.
|
| In short, beliefs (to which emotions are connected) drive
| behavior.
| richardw wrote:
| I assume you have no bad habits?
|
| Can you instantly get back to sleep?
|
| You never snap at anyone?
|
| Diet is 100% what you want it to be?
|
| Exercise on time daily?
|
| Read HN only as much as you know it benefits you?
|
| Marine you're the 0.0001% who has all this down but most
| don't. I'm sure there are many other examples of how most
| people barely control our minds and actions.
| xpe wrote:
| > You cannot control what you feel, but you can control
| your actions.
|
| I'll respond in a way that I hope is clear and relatively
| objective. This will take the form of an "if-then" claim
| nested within another "if-then" claim.
|
| IF a person (1) accepts philosophical
| materialism, but (2) remains agnostic as to quantum
| effects at macro scale
|
| THEN then the following response follows logically:
|
| It depends what you mean by "you". If you (a) mean that
| "you" consists of the body, including the brain; and (b)
| you recognize there is a physiological difference between
| _non-volitional_ and _volitional_ choices; then (c) yes,
| loosely speaking, "you" can control your volitional
| actions.
|
| If you think carefully, you will recognize the above
| assumptions also mean:
|
| - a person's surrounding context plays an essential role in
| shaping the kinds of actions that are available.
|
| - there are no causes other than material ones (such as a
| soul)
|
| You may notice I didn't use the phrase "free will" above.
| That is very much intentional. Even if you are a
| philosopher, that word is nearly impossible to use in a way
| with a definition that a group of people can agree on.
|
| See also: "Volition and Action in the Human Brain:
| Processes, Pathologies, and Reasons" by Itzhak Fried,
| Patrick Haggard, ...
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5678016/
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Note that non-material causes can be just as
| deterministic (if not more so) as matter. Logic and math
| are physical but not material, for instance.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Logic and math are physical but not material, for
| instance.
|
| Logic and math are neither physical, nor material, nor
| causal.
| xpe wrote:
| I think some might be slightly troubled by hearing that
| logic is not causal. But I agree.
|
| One can _test_ a set of statements to see if they are
| valid logical deductions from another set of statements.
| Even if true, this does not mean that the deducible
| statements are _caused_.
|
| In some cases, that statement from above (the deduced
| one) might be 'realized' (noticed by people) before its
| premises are!
|
| We might even be able to logically prove it is true
| without the other set of statements! Why? There are
| multiple logical paths (not always mapping to reality)
| that _could_ prove a particular statement.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| They are physical causes but they are abstracted from
| matter. The underlying cause originates from the
| math/logic, not the material instantiation. Physicalism
| is often conflated with materialism, but the world is
| physically constituted by more than matter!
|
| A lot of this world is obviously caused by the inherent
| formal influence of math and logic. There are ongoing
| mysteries in this, to be sure, but these forms are beyond
| matter. I'm speaking from the Pythagorean-Platonic-
| Tegmark school of thought. I'm trying to address the
| typical atheist layperson scientist who hasn't thought
| through immaterial reality (rejecting it as supernatural,
| thinking it involves ghosts or spirits or something). I
| know there are reasonable counter positions to argue why
| math isn't real, but I don't subscribe.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > They are physical causes but they are abstracted from
| matter.
|
| That sequence of words doesn't even denote a coherent
| concept. To be physical is exactly to be a state of
| matter/energy.
|
| > The underlying cause originates from the math/logic,
| not the material instantiation.
|
| No, logic, including math, describes the relationship
| between abstract concepts. It doesn't cause anything.
| Implication is not causation.
|
| > I'm trying to address the typical atheist layperson
| scientist who hasn't thought through immaterial reality
|
| I'm Catholic, not atheist, and I have no problem with
| immaterial reality, or even immaterial causes of material
| effects. But I do have a problem with the simple error of
| describing immaterial concepts as being physical causes,
| or with describing systems of concepts and oc describing
| their relations as causes of anything, except insofar as
| _belief_ in them causes behavior in the believer.
|
| > I know there are reasonable counter positions to argue
| why math isn't real, but I don't subscribe.
|
| There are certainly senses in which "math is real" is a
| valid or defensible statement, but bot in the sense of it
| being a physical thing which can exist as a cause.
| Retric wrote:
| When living things or machines do math they are doing a
| physical thing.
|
| The abstract concept of mathematics doesn't need to exist
| for that to happen.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| I think there's two conceptions of free will, one is as
| you described -- a body being able to act in and of
| itself without any influence of an external force (beyond
| sensation, physical constraints, etc).
|
| That sort of punts on the question of physical
| determinism, where it doesn't matter if it was possible
| for you to have done anything other than what you did.
| You could be a pure clock work automaton making
| deterministic responses to external stimuli and still
| have that sort of "free will", but I don't think that
| would be satisfying to a lot of people.
|
| The second kind of free will, I think would be the
| ability to have a free choice -- that there is some
| immaterial entity which can act in somehow a non-
| deterministic way to choose its behavior, that the course
| of your entire life wasn't set at the big bang -- that
| not only can you act independently, but that your choices
| _matter_ and will result in a future that was not
| predetermined. I think that is what a lot of people would
| think of as free will, and it's difficult to define or
| logically support IMO.
| xpe wrote:
| I can appreciate a lot of the sentiments above, but I
| don't think the comment's "two conceptions" really
| 'decomplects' (a Hickeyism) the key ideas. If anything,
| it smooshes a lot of them together: different definitions
| of free will, meaning, origin stories, the divine,
| flavors of determinism, and more.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Can you?
|
| I'm a type 1 diabetic, I have a continuous monitor that
| tells me what my glucose level is. This monitors actual
| interstitial fluid level and not blood sugar, this means
| there can be a pretty large delay between what's measured
| just under the skin versus what my blood stream is
| experiencing. If a rapid drop occurs there can be a lead
| time that I'm unaware of it, but others are because I'll
| behave in a 'cranky' or 'sharp' tone. I'm not aware this is
| occurring when it does. A little sugar and a few minutes
| and I'm back to regular me again.
|
| You are in far less control of your actions then you
| believe. Internal self awareness is a poor mirror of
| reality.
| xpe wrote:
| Well said.
|
| > You are in far less control of your actions then you
| believe.
|
| No. But I say this in a way that might surprise you?
|
| I view 'free will', as most people understand it, as an
| illusion.
|
| I recognize that I, at best, have a tiny fraction of
| control. If I consider "me" to be a locus of control
| w.r.t. volitional action, then I will grant that "me" has
| causal impact. But what causally impacted "me" at time t?
| A combination of "me" at time t-1 and my environment.
| (I'm a materialist who is agnostic w.r.t. determinism.)
|
| So, what does this really mean? "I" (right now) can only
| have volitional control only if one ignores the
| precursors. It is a mindbending realization to many, but
| it is the best theory I've found that fits reality.
|
| There are lots of us around. We might disagree on how we
| define 'free will'; we may or may not 'deny free will'.
| But there is a huge commonality among most rational
| materialists who accept modern science: we do not
| conceptualize free will in ways that match 'mainstream'
| notions of it.
| geye1234 wrote:
| The trouble with this argument is it applies to your
| thoughts about reality, not just to your will.
|
| Your argument implies your thoughts at time t are
| _solely_ the result of your state at time t-1 and your
| environment. But if that 's the case, your thoughts
| aren't _about_ reality; they 're just a _result_ of
| reality, a result of whatever state you happen to be in.
|
| But if your thoughts aren't about reality, why should
| your argument about free will -- or about anything else
| -- carry any weight?
|
| Causal processes are not the same as logical reasoning,
| and if you reduce the processes of the mind to the
| former, you remove the possibility of rational argument.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| If you consider the processes of the mind to be acausal,
| that also removes the possibility of rational argument.
|
| It's possible that I'm a Boltzmann brain with nonsensical
| memories about environmental stimuli that mislead me
| about what reality is, but it's tedious to prepend every
| statement about reality with "the conception of reality
| that my state at time t-1 and my environment have lead me
| to believe is the most likely candidate for reality."
|
| That doesn't seem to be a particularly useful objection
| to the philosophy that GP espoused, instead, you have to
| assume his same priors - materialist, agnostic w.r.t.
| determinism, and some basic assumptions about senses and
| a shared reality.
| geye1234 wrote:
| I didn't claim the mind's processes were acausal; simply
| that they could not be reduced to cause, to the exclusion
| of anything else. If they can be so reduced, rational
| argument is impossible, because causal processes are not
| the same as rational argument. When I punch "2 + 2 ="
| into a calculator and the screen says "4", it's a causal
| process. When my kid grasps that 2 + 2 = 4, it's
| different. His mind has reasoned its way to this truth;
| it is not simply that the brain-state "2 + 2" has
| produced the further brain-state "4". If that were the
| case, he (and we) could never know that 2+2 resulted in
| 4; it could just as easily produce 5, or a green rabbit,
| or whatever else our mind had been caused to think at any
| given time.
|
| If reasoning has any validity, it cannot be reduced to
| causal processes.
|
| Therefore any argument -- any attempt at reasoning --
| that claims that the mind's processes are merely causal
| undermines itself in the very process of being made.
| xpe wrote:
| > causal processes are not the same as rational argument
|
| Yes.
|
| ...I'm taking this step-by-step...
|
| But causal processes can _generate_ rational argument.
| Agree or disagree?
| xpe wrote:
| > Causal processes are not the same as logical reasoning,
| and if you reduce the processes of the mind to the
| former, you remove the possibility of rational argument.
|
| (I'm not sure if this applies to what I was saying or
| not; I'll put that aside.)
|
| I'll rephrase the comment above to help ensure I'm
| talking about the same thing. The claim, as I understand
| it, goes like this: if one believes the mind is governed
| by causal processes, then there is no possibility of the
| brain doing logical reasoning.
|
| Am I understanding the argument as you intended?
|
| I'll proceed with my understanding of it... I don't buy
| it. Computers are causal and can do logical reasoning
| just fine.
| xpe wrote:
| > Your argument implies your thoughts at time t are
| solely the result of your state at time t-1 and your
| environment.
|
| The laws of physics also matter.
|
| I think we're still on the same page here.
|
| I'm trying to figure out if we disagree, and if so,
| where.
| xpe wrote:
| > But if that's the case, your thoughts aren't about
| reality; they're just a result of reality, a result of
| whatever state you happen to be in.
|
| According to my premises (materialism being the key one),
| thoughts are the result of the combination of (a) what
| happened before and (b) the laws of the universe.
|
| So thoughts can be both: (1) a causal result (previous
| paragraph) and (2) _about_ reality, from the point of
| view of one's consciousness.
|
| Any disagreement here?
| thegrimmest wrote:
| I agree that free will functionally doesn't exist.
| However for the purposes of social organization I see no
| better alternative than to treat each person as an agent
| and hold them fully accountable for their actions,
| regardless of upstream "causal" impacts.
|
| If you're starving/high/whatever and you violate someone
| else's fundamental rights, the reasons/excuses you give
| as to why your control was compromised seem irrelevant.
| Actions and outcomes count, not intentions.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > Actions and outcomes count, not intentions.
|
| There is a whole division in law around mens rea vs actus
| reus that disagrees with this take.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| I'm aware, but the bar for a guilty mind is quite low.
| You basically have to have known what you are doing,
| which we assume just about every conscious person does.
| There are also crimes where mens rea isn't even applied
| to a perpetrator, but to a reasonable objective analyzer
| (eg. manslaughter).
| xpe wrote:
| > If you're starving/high/whatever and you violate
| someone else's fundamental rights, the reasons/excuses
| you give as to why your control was compromised seem
| irrelevant. > If you're starving/high/whatever and you
| violate someone else's fundamental rights, the
| reasons/excuses you give as to why your control was
| compromised seem irrelevant. Actions and outcomes count,
| not intentions.
|
| Yes, people _often_ people give rationalizations of
| dubious merit. These are muddled, complicated
| 'reflections' of the full reality. So it is wise to not
| give them too much weight. (But it can be very
| interesting to try to parse them, but that's another
| topic...!)
|
| Next point. From a predictive point of view about public
| safety, the context and situation matters. For example,
| consider the case of an addict who regularly steals
| because he is driven by the addiction. If he can break
| the habit (hopefully with help of many kinds), the theft
| problem largely goes away. Understanding the dynamic
| helps us understand downstream outcomes.
| fidrelity wrote:
| I consider free will fundamentally an illusion but at the
| abstraction level of 'me' (also a faulty abstraction) it
| does make sense to use these concepts sometimes.
|
| But it's important not to confuse the map with the
| territory.
| MadcapJake wrote:
| yes, a prisoner may be locked inside and have a laid out
| routine for them, but they do still have a say in the
| minutiae and their small actions could actually echo into
| the future.
|
| Another thought, just because our unconscious mind also
| plays a part, people fear that this implies mostly
| determinism but really why are we considering that as not
| also our thoughts too? They're just thoughts that our
| deeper mind has put forth and our deeper mind doesn't
| usually want to be questioned, they've got more hard
| data. Still you _can_ fight this or things like suicide,
| soldiers. daredevils wouldn 't be possible. We just don't
| get to see how it came to conclusions so we assume it's
| some hard-wired code.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| It's simpler than that. Your thoughts -- the internal
| monologue deciding what actions to take -- are the
| _result_ of physical processes in the brain. There is no
| way those non-physical thoughts are changing the physical
| processes; they happen after the fact. We have the
| illusion of being in the driver seat but really we are
| just along for the ride.
|
| This is assuming you adhere only to what science can
| prove, and not religious beliefs like the soul.
|
| But yeah, the fact that we are the result of past
| decisions and outside inputs going all the way back to
| before we even had consciousness at all is also a nice
| proof by induction.
| ad987 wrote:
| > There is no way those non-physical thoughts are
| changing the physical processes; they happen after the
| fact.
|
| How can the truth of this statement be proven? Non-
| physical thoughts cannot be observed, so they are out of
| reach of being tested for being correct.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > Non-physical thoughts cannot be observed
|
| We wouldn't even be able to _talk about them_ , because
| if we did, there would be a causal chain starting with a
| non-psysical thought and ending with moving a (physical)
| tongue. So somewhere along that chain, a non-physical
| thing would need to make a physical thing move. How
| exactly?
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Eventually we may have sufficiently fine-grained ability
| to observe brain states, plus a strong enough
| understanding of neuropsychology, such that an outside
| observer can accurately predict, for a brain under
| observation:
|
| 1. The subjective internal mental state of the
| participant (e.g. "you were imagining a red balloon")
|
| 2. Actions that will be taken before they physically
| manifest (e.g. "you will throw rock instead of scissors")
|
| If an outside observer can do these things without access
| to subjects' thoughts, especially with subjects'
| deliberate efforts to fool the observers, then IMO it is
| pretty clear evidence the thoughts are meaningless.
|
| As for the current day, I say the preponderance of
| evidence is on anyone who claims otherwise. There's lots
| of evidence suggesting free will is an illusion, and no
| evidence of telekinesis or the like.
| tcskeptic wrote:
| > There is no way those non-physical thoughts are
| changing the physical processes; they happen after the
| fact. We have the illusion of being in the driver seat
| but really we are just along for the ride.
|
| How can you conclude this with any certainty?
| krisoft wrote:
| > There is no way those non-physical thoughts are
| changing the physical processes
|
| I don't believe this to be correct. There is nothing non-
| physical about thoughts. Thoughts are mater interacting
| with mater.
|
| Thoughts are to the brain what waves are to the ocean.
| They are not less physical than the brain itself.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| You cannot point to a neurotransmitter or neuron or
| synapse and say "that's a thought." Thoughts are not
| material. You might say they are not real. Even if you
| can point to a group of neurons and processes in the
| brain and associate it with a particular thought, the
| thought itself is not real. The neurons and their
| behaviors are.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Inasmuch as thoughts have a one-to-one coupling with the
| physical processes in the brain, then we are saying the
| same thing.
|
| But qualia (the more accurate/descriptive term for what
| we are discussing) are inherently subjective and non-
| physical by definition. Both of us can observe an ocean
| wave using many different methods (direct observation
| with light, their effect on a buoy, their impact with the
| shore, etc). However we can never both observe your
| qualia. I have no way to determine that your perception
| of "red" and mine are equivalent. There is no way you can
| explain vision to a blind person; yet a blind person can
| have their own understanding of an ocean wave.
| hattmall wrote:
| Of course you can control your actions. But that doesn't
| mean they can't be influenced by external factors like
| drugs, weather, or in your case low blood sugar.
|
| You don't have absolute total free will in all
| situations. That's why development of willpower is such a
| huge discipline (religion, meditation, etc).
|
| There's a range where your blood sugar starts to
| influence your actions, with more willpower and
| cultivating a less cranky personality you could certainly
| extend that range.
|
| Some people have similar non-beneficail reactions to high
| stress situations, other people develop the skill to
| abstain from those actions and maintain control in those
| situations.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Willpower occurs after awareness. They are objectively
| different things.
|
| If you are not aware of something, you cannot choose to
| make a reaction for or against it. For example, imagine
| that your body did not detect heat. If you put your hand
| on a burner you would instinctively withdraw from it (and
| yes this happens in people that do not feel pain).
|
| Willpower is in the ballpark of conscious awareness. "I
| choose to do X or Y"
|
| Training on the other hand attempts to remove the
| conscious decision part from the mind _after_ awareness
| occurs. "If X then Y", this way you're not wasting time
| and brainpower trying to figure out what's going on.
| stevezsa8 wrote:
| My wife is also T1, diagnosed a couple years back with a
| week in ICU. She pulled through and now has a CGM and
| pump.
|
| What really surprised me was her blood sugar rockets up
| when she has video meetings with a certain difficult
| colleague. While other chilled colleagues have no such
| effect.
|
| That made me wonder if interacting with difficult people
| causes more physiological changes than I realised.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| There are observable changes in the structure of the
| brain when people take up meditation. Not to get too
| crass, but we are the meat in our heads and bodies.
| stevezsa8 wrote:
| I'm not into mediation, but I watched something that said
| the brain scans of meditating experts resembled someone
| having a seizure or something. But the person with sat
| quietly.
|
| I'm not drawing any conclusions. But I found it
| fascinating.
| brewdad wrote:
| My mother was a T1 diabetic back in the days where
| insulin injections were basically a best guess based on
| what you had eaten and planned to eat. It was always fun
| as a child not knowing whether my little screw-ups would
| bring an exasperated sigh and a chuckle or the low-
| glucose demon.
|
| I'm so happy that managing your disease is much more
| straightforward than it was in the 70s or 80s. It also
| appears that life expectancies are much higher since it's
| easier to avoid the extreme roller coaster of too high
| and too low blood sugar. Best wishes.
| watwut wrote:
| Uncontrolled aggression is one of common symptoms of low
| blood sugar. If you are not diabetic it should not just
| happen, your body should deal with situation. But it does
| happen to diabetics and they have to watch out for that.
| blangk wrote:
| No, you are Danny Devito. Here eat a snickers.
| amenhotep wrote:
| The sophistry here is the unsupported framing of the two as
| mutually exclusive. What do you think "you", the entity that
| does or does not have free will, are, other than a system of
| internal chemical reactions? Are you a soulist?
| s0kr8s wrote:
| 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.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Could you tell the story of what experiencing schizoid symptoms
| was like? I'm always curious!
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I have a number of blogs that somewhat include these
| feelings:
|
| https://jondouglas.dev/little-dark-age/
|
| https://jondouglas.dev/the-stress-of-life/
|
| https://jondouglas.dev/save-your-soul/
|
| https://jondouglas.dev/obsessive-compulsive/
|
| https://jondouglas.dev/love-of-fate/
|
| https://jondouglas.dev/from-the-ashes/
|
| Lots of depersonalization, heightened nerves, low lows, and
| desire to be alone. If you've ever read Leo Tolstoy, the best
| description is in his novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich".
| exolymph wrote:
| Nerd-sniped: Free will is an incoherent idea. We don't choose
| our preferences, which dictate our choices. (And even supposing
| you can choose a preference, that's only due to the preexisting
| desire to have such a preference. Turtles all the way down.)
| What would an unconstrained choice even be? Just random,
| arbitrary? That doesn't sound "free" either.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > We don't choose our preferences
|
| As a doxastic voluntarist, I reject this notion entirely.
| xpe wrote:
| > Doxastic voluntarism is a philosophical view that people
| elect their own beliefs; that is, that subjects have a
| certain amount of control over what they believe
|
| Do you hold such a view as a first principle? Or did you
| arrive at it via consideration of other factors?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Do you mean to ask if someone can choose not to be a
| doxastic voluntarist?
|
| You can't choose to be a doxastic voluntarist as much as
| you can't choose not to be one. One can only become one
| involuntarily.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Ancient religion and philosophy taught that _habits influence
| desires_ far more strongly than desires influence habits.
|
| It is possible to want different desires (if you disagree,
| ask any recovering drug addict). So even conflicting desires
| can exist simultaneously on multiple planes of consciousness.
|
| A powerful way to change your desires to be what you want
| them to be is to change your habits.
| xpe wrote:
| Yes, and that raises the question: by what mechanisms do we
| change our habits?
|
| I like an idea mentioned by James Clear (author of the
| "Atomic Habits" book) that each action we take is a "vote"
| towards establishing or breaking a habit.
|
| There are connections between this notion and
| neurochemistry, such as Hebbian learning.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| One important mechanism for changing habits is to _join a
| community_ of people who are practicing the habits you
| wish to practice. A thoughtful, intentional choice of
| _whom_ to associate with is one of the most powerful
| forms of agency we possess.
|
| Zooming out a bit, local communities of people who
| practice virtuous habits are an indispensable cornerstone
| of society, for by them we gain agency to desire and do
| what is virtuous.
| function_seven wrote:
| Sure, but what motivates that change in habits? Does it
| spontaneously arise? Does is trace back to some other
| event? Neither of these illustrate a degree of freedom.
| [deleted]
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The idea isn't incoherent so much as the word free invites a
| lot of creative interpretations.
|
| Free will is really all about making decisions that guide the
| evolution of the universe, rather than being a powerless
| observer. The fact that our decisions are constrained due to
| circumstances does not change the fact that we make them.
| iandanforth wrote:
| Have a friend with a PANDAS child. Really hard to even hear
| about. Total personality change, constant battles, even when it
| gets better the fear of reoccurrence. Truly awful.
| tetris11 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PANDAS
|
| > Pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated
| with streptococcal infections (PANDAS) is a controversial
| hypothetical diagnosis for a subset of children with rapid
| onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or tic disorders.
|
| > The proposed link between infection and these disorders is
| that an autoimmune reaction to infection produces antibodies
| that interfere with basal ganglia function, causing symptom
| exacerbations, and this autoimmune response results in a broad
| range of neuropsychiatric symptoms.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| When you consider that chronic and acute autoimmune disease
| is totally a thing. For instance Hashimoto's disease where
| the immune system attacks the thyroid is chronic progressing.
| Thyroiditis, is acute and resolves.
|
| It would seem the burden of proof is on those that say the
| brain isn't subject to autoimmune disorders. Because
| everything else is.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-26 23:01 UTC)