Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan
speaker
271 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'll give you another one, which is the belief in the sonic weapon.
Somebody who is clearly intelligent and educated and works for a embassy in Cuba hears a noise in the middle of the night and develops symptoms with hearing loss and dizziness and ringing in the ears and believes that they have been targeted by some sort of weapon, which was actually perfectly reasonable in some regards because the embassy had been closed in Cuba for a long time.
And these sort of things do happen.
Exactly. I think the sort of Russian spies, I don't have the terminology for all of this stuff, but they do have a reputation for going into people's houses, moving things around to mess with people's heads and so forth. I mean, it was perfectly reasonable for this person to think that something had happened to them.
The difficulty again was the idea that there was such a thing as a sonic weapon took off within the embassy community. It's exactly where these mass psychogenic illnesses happen in these contained communities, potentially under threat that are quite insular. So people really began to believe in this concept that there could be a sonic weapon that were being directed at individuals.
The problem is that scientifically it makes no sense because sound doesn't damage the brain in that way. You know, if you've got a big explosion that's big enough for everyone to hear it and to displace your whole body, well then sure, your brain could be damaged and so could the rest of your body. But sound cannot be directed at a brain to damage it.
Sound just travels along nerves into the brain. So scientifically it made zero sense whatsoever. But unfortunately, people really bought into it.
The whole thing was so illogical. You've got to feel for these people's position because I think Marco Rubio was saying things about this weapon. They were being called in and they were being told by the highest forces in their country to hide behind walls and to be frightened.
These are the TikTok tics, essentially. So there were a few quite active people on TikTok who were demonstrating their Tourette's syndrome. It led essentially to an outbreak of not exactly Tourette's, but Tourette's-like syndrome throughout the world. So young people began presenting to doctors with Tourette's-like symptoms.
symptoms, but they obviously didn't have Tourette's because often these psychosomatic conditions, they are your idea of what a seizure would be like, or they are your idea of what Tourette's syndrome is like more than they are like the actual thing. That swept the world. But the problem with these things is that most people will be fine because most people, this will be a passing thing.
It'll happen to them and it'll disappear. But vulnerable people We'll go to doctors and have tests and this can all get very out of control. So for a small number of people, it's probably been a persistent problem.
Again, that's coming back to my current theme of overdiagnosis, which is when does worrying about your health become hypochondria? It's when it stops you living a normal life and it disables you. So it's perfectly okay. to worry about your health and to be a person who thinks, what's that? What's that? We all have a different kind of personalities and we all have different foibles and so forth.
If it isn't disabling you, I wouldn't call it hypochondria.
Okay, that makes sense. No real consequences. That's precisely the thing, isn't it? We're really into using medical words to describe our personalities and the way we feel now. It's a trend. And then once you start using the medical words, then suddenly you find yourself potentially being diagnosed with something. But the line in the sand has got to be disability and impairment.
And that's something I think people need to think about when they're kind of using medical terms in a casual way.
This little town in Kazakhstan called Krasnogorsk. It's literally in the middle of nowhere. Really hard place to get to. In, again, about 2012, 2010, a woman working in the market there, she couldn't be woken up. They noticed that she appeared to be asleep or unconscious. Her name was Lyubov. The other people in the market tried to wake her up. They couldn't. They took her to the hospital.
Nobody could understand what it was. Although it was a small town, it had good health care facilities. So they did all the usual kind of scans and stuff and everything was fine. They said, maybe you've had a stroke, which, to be honest, wasn't a great diagnosis because stroke wouldn't really present like that.
Yeah, she's woken up. They say you probably had a stroke. Go home.
I should have applied. They had done as much as they could to it.
See, I'm not sure that's what they don't want to say. I think that saying you don't know when you don't know isn't that hard. So if someone comes to you and says, I've got a pain in my toe and you don't know, there's not really any recriminations from saying, you know, I'm sorry, I've looked at everything I can. I don't know what that is. Patients don't get angry at that.
Showing 121–140 of 271 · page 7 of 14
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