Rheumatoid arthritis used to be a psychogenic illness. Parkinson’s. MS. Etc. It seems most psychogenic illnesses over time prove to be real. Doctors need to stop using this as a crutch when they can’t explain something, it’s harmful. Just say “we don’t know, this doesn’t make sense to us based on what we know at this time.”
By cherry-picking your cases, you can argue either side of the issue.
There's a lot more science to throw at these issues than was available in the days of some of the other illnesses you mentioned.
You could tell they were going to slant things right from the start when they started first with introducing Bekah and her quirky “witch” and “psychic” beliefs, before even getting to the diagnostics or how they were diagnosed. The documentary makers definitely crossed some ethical lines by cutting in that doctor talking answering general prompts about psychological illness, and splicing that in with patients answering questions about their emotional state, etc.
One thing it was good for though was to see just how horribly taken advantage of desperate and sick people can be by quacks. The show featured a lot of quacks such as Suzanne Kim and the Sophia Institute and that lady on Marthas Vineyard. I really wish I had the hours of material they left out to produce a documentary on what these quacks prescribed and charged their clients.
Edit: I’ll say on the subject of Jamison for example, if you want a better documentary on ME/CFS take a look at Unrest, also on Netflix. (And Forgotten Plague I think on Prime.) But even that science has progressed a long way in the past couple of years since that came out.
This is related to the same epistemological territory people go over and over when debating dark matter, or evolution, or AGW. Observations don't go away just because you question a theory.
Does it? Really? Should I be worried about Korean fan-death?
Even if you don't agree with that statement, it's what people who prefer imperial units will say, not that there's some mass delusion / patriotic identity.
National identity is great, I guess, but at some point, it becomes actively harmful not to call out stupidity when it presents itself so flagrantly.
If it takes social pressure to get people to stop believing absurd things, then so be it.
Koreans don't put fan death on some kind of nationalistic pedestal of overdramatic belief systems that make you Korean. If we wanted nationalistic symbols, we already have plenty---starting with Dokdo (a.k.a. Takeshima, but don't utter that word in front of a Korean), the "East Sea" (more commonly known as "Sea of Japan"), and... but I digress.
Koreans believed fan death because their mothers did, and then their mothers did, and also the 9 pm news used to say "Yet another person found dead next to a fan" every summer, because in a hot, humid country of 50 million people someone is going to be found dead in a hot day next to a running fan.
How could it be a "national identity", when the very concept that some people might not consider sleeping-next-to-a-fan as deadly was beyond people's imagination. (Remember, it was time before the internet.) Now, thanks to the internet and everything, (I hope) most Koreans know that "Fan Death" is a silly urban folklore. We even scored our own Wikipedia entry. Nice.
As I said think of it more like regional pride in barbecue. People from memphis don't think their barbecue is their identity, but if you insult it or say that Memphis barbecue sucks they defend it about as much as I have seen people in Korea defend fan death when my friend questioned it.
Tuberculosis in the 50s was still being blamed on psychology.[1]
Ulcers. Epilepsy. Myasthenia Gravis. Hypertension.
Autism was blamed on the mother’s personality!
Celiac disease. Schizophrenia. Cardiac diseases. Colitis.
Oh this is a doozy. Remember AIDS?
"It is argued that (a) AIDS is a typical example of epidemic hysteria, (b) the epidemic has at its core an unconscious group delusion that can be called the group fantasy of scapegoating" [2]
Turns out when people say they’re sick and something is wrong, there is almost always a cause even if we don’t know what. The body is complex. We still have a hell of a lot to learn. And doctors are being really lazy and damaging to patients when to dismiss a difficult to explain illness as psycho-genic/social/logical.
Your example of fan death is a superstition, which is not the same thing as an illness diagnosed as “psychogenic” by a doctor.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/archneurpsyc/article-abstra... [2] http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1985-14989-001
There are always some denialists or crackpots out there, but I don't think your examples necessarily show that doctors are lazy and default to psychogenic means.