social rejection of unverifiable syndromes - migraine

[Guest guest]

This was refreshing to encounter in the so-Freudian NY Times. I had to

double check to make sure I wasnt reading the Post. Specifically it's

from an NYT blog on chronic daily headache (author also has a book on

the same subject).

" Episodic migraine, which was classified as " psychogenic " over the

Freud-governed middle decades of the 20th century, only became

credible as biologically " real " in the 1960s with the introduction of

a newly effective and much lauded preventive migraine drug,

methysergide, actually derived from LSD, which may help explain a

possible side effect of terrifying hallucinations. (It's best known as

the brand name Sansert, which was discontinued in the U.S. in 2002

because of potential harm to the heart and kidneys). The superior

triptans of the 1990s also helped make migraines more legit. "

http://migraine.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/leaving-the-rabbit-hole/index.html

It'd be interesting to see whether her characterization of the history

is well supported. After all, biomedical science was no joke in 1960;

today we think of the biomed workers of that time as basically our

peers - which is not necessarily true or as true of say the workers of

the 1930s. I haven't heard of a disease being called psychogenic at

that late a date, and then proven physiological by a simple,

overwhelmingly clear critical experiment (as opposed to a balance of

evidence). It points up the hubris of concluding psychogenicity on the

basis of negative evidence, which is of course still done.