Yes it does, all the time. Before Diabetes was a known condition, it was considered a mental disorder. Then diabetes became widely understood, but for a short time hypoglycemia was considered a mental disorder. Nowadays, hypo and hyperglycemia that are triggered without actual blood sugar level changes, are considered a mental disorder.

I know, because there is someone in my family with that last one. But if you do enough research, it turns out there are specialists out there, who are studying exactly that condition, and claim it to be related to something in the pancreas. But talk to a doctor outside that small circle? Mental disorder.

> Before Diabetes was a known condition, it was considered a mental disorder.

That's a disingenuous comparison. Lyme disease is a known condition, with empirical tests to detect it and clinically proven treatments.

> with empirical tests to detect it and clinically proven treatments

Yes, but the article is about chronic lyme which is not clinically proven AFAIK.

Right, and that's part of what makes chronic lyme so unlikely. We've got a known mechanism for lyme disease, and chronic lyme advocates try to hand-wave away the fact that that evidence of that mechanism can't be found in its alleged sufferers.

That was the point of my post though. Its a moving target. First it was diabetes. Then hypo/hyperglycemia. Then hypo/hyperglycemia when it manifests in ways that aren't understood. Etc

This, to me, sounds like more of the same. First lymes wasn't known. Then it was identified, but chronic lyme is a mental disorder. Eventually, given enough study, chronic lyme will be understood, and then people who don't fit into that paradigm will be the ones with 'mental disorders'. Its a moving goalpost.

I'm not trying to invalidate a lot of smart research in the area. I'm saying that when medical science doesn't know enough about an issue to truly identify and treat it, by the nature of the way science works (step 1 is identifying the problem, and likely that hasn't even been done yet) medical practitioners can't do anything about it in good faith. So they'll suggest you find remediation as best you can, perhaps with therapy to help. Or else you're stuck looking for a specialist in your area, or a less-mainstream doctor who's willing to bend rules and provide home remedies with your symptoms, neither of which the medical profession can ethically suggest to you.

Look at it another way: in order for something to be studied, enough people have to get it to create a statistical sample size, and a large enough sample set to be potentially profitable or worth researching. That means, by definition, there are plenty of people out there with ailments that haven't crossed that threshold yet. Or, even more likely, there are plenty of people out there with problems, but due to the unknown nature of the problem, they haven't been successfully grouped together for study yet, even if they are over the threshold. Who's to say chronic lymes doesn't fit into those categories? Lymes itself is still a relatively new ailment.

I don't know either, but the presentation was a little off-putting to me as well. It seems somewhat odd to refer to the "journey" you took with your son as "the hero's journey".

When I was visiting Colonial Williamsburg they had a medical historian answering questions and the most interesting one to me was "What happened to consumption?"

The disease "consumption" was very common in colonial times, but was never really a formal disease, just a collection of symptoms. As medical science got better it got split into emphysema, pneumonia, and other more specific lung issues.

When I hear about things like Lymes disease, I wonder if we're still at the splitting apart to a more specific diagnoses stage.

One of my friends was basically living this scenario - diagnosed with Lymes disease until he had some new genetic tests done and it was determined that he conclusively had a different neurological condition.

It's hard to remember that in 50 years time they'll look back at shudder at what poor diagnostic and medical tools were available in the 2010s.

After reading the description of "Morgellan's", it actually makes other pseudodiagnoses seem reasonable.

Yeah I mean it's the canonical example. But their support groups and conventions and special doctors all sound very similar.