Thanks for the additional details. As you understand, I don't fault the doctors for being mystified by this disease. I fault them for ignoring plain, specific symptoms and instead leaping to the conclusion that their patients were delusional.
I experienced something like that many years ago when I was an undergraduate at Harvard. One evening I got up from an easy chair and had a dizzy spell which almost made me faint. (Later I figured it was the result of getting up too quickly after having sat in the chair reading for a long time. It takes the heart a moment to adjust the blood pressure.)
Anyway, I was worried at the time so the next day I visited the Harvard infirmary and described my symptoms. The doctor started questioning me in what I recognized to be Freudian psychoanalytic terms. Recognizing where he was coming from, I muttered a few answers, backed out of there, and never went back again.
The doctor was obviously a jerk, but a dangerous jerk, because in those days if you were labeled delusional you could be put away. The psychoanalysts thought they were gods. In some ways it's no great improvement to throw crazy people out into the streets, which has been the practice since R. D. Laing and the 1960s, but it's probably better than locking people up on the questionable word of a psychological "expert."
I have read R. D. Laing and his cronies as well.
You were lucky it wasn't worse.
Anyway, I was worried at the time so the next day I visited the Harvard infirmary and described my symptoms. The doctor started questioning me in what I recognized to be Freudian psychoanalytic terms. Recognizing where he was coming from, I muttered a few answers, backed out of there, and never went back again.
The doctor was obviously a jerk, but a dangerous jerk, because in those days if you were labeled delusional you could be put away. The psychoanalysts thought they were gods. In some ways it's no great improvement to throw crazy people out into the streets, which has been the practice since R. D. Laing and the 1960s, but it's probably better than locking people up on the questionable word of a psychological "expert."