Foghead Nation

May 30, 2024

We are Growing in Numbers, but not in Power

It seems that greater numbers of people in the Atlantisphere are being stricken with what I will call the Mitochondrial conditions. In a great many of these cases, people never fully recover.

The biggest driver of the recent increase in fogheads is ‘Long Covid’. Incredibly, there are people wandering around who have no idea what long covid is. They are usually coincident with people who think the covid pandemic is ‘over’.

Such people, of course, have a very different form of mental impairment than that caused by long covid, fibromyalgia, or myoencephalitis, or some other less common conditions. Unlike the ‘covid deniers’, at least we fogheads do no damage. We just hang around being miserable.

That is, unless you are a screwhead libertarian industrial capitalist. To them, we are among the useless eaters, who add little or nothing for anyone’s revenue stream, and consume health care and welfare services. Worse, we mostly do not spend much because we inherited nothing, had no savings, used up our savings, have no rich relatives to sponge off, or so on. 

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Most fogheads lost their health at some time during their adult lives. I have always had Fibromyalgia.

I think I would rather have been born paraplegic. At least then it would have been clear that I do indeed have a disability and cannot do certain things. I would have still been able to fully use my mind, and had adequate energy.

What a precious thing that would have been. But I have learned to build a life around what I do have, and what I am able to do. The isolation forced on you by this type of illness is hard, but it is better than beating yourself up endlessly over what you cannot do.

Everyone’s disease is different. Some people recover over time. Some recover partly. Many are going to live with it the rest of their lives.

Some will be moderately effected. Some people will be shut out of the workforce and of society. Some people will have to be cared for, all the rest of their lives, which will likely be shortened.

The mitochondrial illnesses, and other conditions which leave people with limited energy, isolate its victims from society and each other in two ways. One of them really cannot be helped; the physical reality of the condition. The other is social and attitudinal, meaning driven by the kind of society we live in.

I will elaborate.

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A basic fact, for the more seriously effected, is that maintaining relationships becomes more difficult. The lack of money is only part of it. Shortage of suitable housing can also be a factor.

But the real issue is, that when you have mitochondrial diseases, that is what you have. It is usually hard to cary on a conversation in a normal way. When you can only be active for short periods, and you are up or down unpredictably on different days, it is hard to maintain a relationship with a healthy person over the long run.

You could develop relationships with other fogheads. The problem with that is, again, money, housing, transportation. Alas, a big impediment to building a foghead community is the attitude of so many of these people.

There are reasons why I have given up on fibro and other support groups. They tend to be full of women of privileged backgrounds, who had previously had careers and good incomes, who are unable to accept and adapt to their new circumstances.

I tend not to be popular in these venues. I am male. I am seen as declasse. I tell them things they do not want to hear.

What they do not want to hear is that they are probably stuck with their conditions for life. They are shopping for miracle cures. They are angry there is no cure, and want to know why so little research is being done into these types of conditions.

Even more depressing to encounter are the people who had not been prospering even before they developed their conditions. They do not have the confidence to demand proper medical care and social supports. They tend to let themselves be gaslit, by the abusive elements in the medical and social systems, into blaming themselves.

This syndrome is particularly bad in men of the generations before the millennial. Their esteem is tied up in being a worker, provider, and independent person. They are often totally destroyed by being unable to act out that role.

A large part of the street population, especially hooked on substances, are really suffering from undiagnosed and debilitating diseases. This includes the ‘messed up mitochondria’ conditions. The industrial establishment remains frustrated at finding no cheap way to get rid of such useless eaters.

Fibro support groups were useful mainly for giving out advice on how to cope with this situation, where to find help, or what medications to try which may help with symptoms. With the advent of covid, and the increasing disruption and suppression of social groups, these have become scarce.

People who have developed these kinds of disabilities either learn how to look after themselves or they gradually die. They learn to organize their lives around their condition, and solve the income stability and housing problems. They maintain some contacts among other fogheads, but live either with family or on their own.

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Organizing to lobby the interests of fogheads is nearly impossible. It is always hard for people brought up in the Canadian culture to organize effectively. When they discover that “getting along” and “being nice” gets them nowhere when they have no leverage, they are lost.

People also have a hard time with the idea that organization means getting something done, not making everyone feel comfortable. People who cannot get over themselves and add something to the group need to drop out.

I recall, some time ago, some of us coined the term “Fibromyalgians”. We were “Fibro nation”. This was a pretty good way of building identity and sense of purpose among people with Fibro. However, a few of them flipped out at this. I think they would be even more bothered by “Foghead Nation”.

Organizing the Fogheads has become even closer to impossible due to the trend in recent years among all kinds of patient advocate groups. The “Big Pharma” and private medical rackets have realized that one of the things they need to do to break down resistance to privatized medicine is to neutralize these patient advocacy groups.

These groups are made up mainly of older people, boomers, with the boomer mentality. This means, big cases of the mentality described above. These people fold right up when they encounter any adversarialism. So it is the easiest thing in the world for operatives, or narcissists run by operatives, to take over the groups.

I have seen this kind of thing go on in many groups. I have seen it in Fibro advocacy groups. Anyone who cannot be led around by the nose is pushed out, or just blocked out.

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The big lever to manipulate people is the anger that there is no treatment for these conditions, and there seems to have been little research into it. What this all gets turned into is a demand for money to be put into research. There is a lot of money to be made now in medical research and there is a lot of junk research going on.

The biggest reason there has been so little research into these conditions is that for a long time the medical establishment denied they even existed. There was no obvious problem which could be seen, or tested for. It was just people saying they felt achy all over, tired, and foggy headed.

This did not create any argument for letting someone get out of the herd of the ‘work force’. Its all in your head. Get some exercise. Do something or other to do with ‘diet’.

Further, any treatment for these conditions would not have been very profitable. Drugs make money when they are used for chronic but non disabling conditions. People with Fibro, Chronic Fatigue, Long Covid problems naturally have limited incomes.

Worse, most of the really effective drugs for treating these conditions have expired patents. Some of them are best treated without drugs, by physiotherapy, exercise, and even ‘diet’. However, these have to be real treatments that work for that patient. There is an incredible amount of quackery regarding treatments for Fibromyalgia (FM) , Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myoencephalitis (CFC/ME) and now Long Covid.

I do not think we are close to treatments or cures for any of these conditions.  There are twenty different theories about what causes them, and fifty about how to treat them. There is no systematic research.

To cure these conditions we first need to cure the medical system. We need serious research into the causes of these conditions, and what actually works in treating them. Right now it is about hustling research grants for the latest fad cures; mercury fillings, holes in your guts, vitamin deficiencies, and so on.

To cure the medical system we first need a cure for capitalism. That requires people who are still healthy and clear minded to get off their asses and get the job done.

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You may have read through this wondering exactly what I mean by Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Long Covid, and especially about “mitochondrial diseases’. I will explain very quickly.

I know all this because I am incredibly smart. It is also strictly my own opinion based on my readings, or actually scannings, of the reams of drivel produced by various web sites reporting on this area of medical research.

You have a mitochondria in every cell in your body. It is a kind of cell within a cell which produces the energy cells need with which to work, especially nerve and muscle cells. They do this through a chemical cycle which does not need explaining here. 

All these conditions are caused by something screwing up the mitochondria so that your brain and muscles do not have the energy to work properly. There is no one cause of this problem. FM, ME/CFS, and LC are waste basket diagnoses for a single syndrome with multiple causes.

If the dominant symptom is muscle pain and stiffness, especially if you have the “pressure points”, it gets called FM. If the big problem is a foggy brain, you may get called for ME/CFS. If it started right after a spell with covid, you have long covid, or as some want to call it, ‘post covid syndrome”.

There are four things which mess up your mitochondria and cause these problems.

1) Physical injury which damages the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
2) Certain types of virus infections, especially repeated ones, which attack the nervous system.
3) Chronic and severe sleeplessness which causes breakdown of the symp/parasymp nervous system.
4) Chronic and extreme emotional stress which exhausts the symp/parasymp nervous system.

Thus, the symp/parasymp system keeps sending activation signals to the mitochondria, like a switch stuck open, which has to shut down to prevent overload. Another scenario is that these nerves cannot send the right signals anymore; the switch is stuck shut.

Once these systems have been damaged, they cannot heal themselves or reset. Unlike the central nervous system, the Symp/Parasymp systems cannot build bypasses for the damaged areas. The sufferer of the condition is stuck with it for good.

The most difficult system in the body to treat or study is the nervous system. Thus it is very hard to study these diseases, or treat them. This is why I do not think there will be a cure for them in my lifetime.

Or, in the lifetimes of most of the whiners who want a cure soon, so they can get back to the lives they had.

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What Foghead nation really needs, and really should be fighting for, is better disability benefits. Greater social provision all around; housing, employment protection, expansion of health care, will also help.

All this is presently being fought for by those social agencies which are adequately resourced and which have the mental muscles to deal with cooptation efforts by operatives for private interest networks. As explained earlier, Fibromyalgia and Foghead nations have a very hard time dealing with silencing efforts without strong support. So far such support is not there.

To conclude, the best way to reduce the population of Foghead nation is better public health. This means;
1) Reduce viral transmission.
2) Reduce stress in society
3) Improve medical care.

The thing which will most improve the lives of we Fogheads is an end to neoliberal capitalism. This will inevitably lead to a better medical system and better planned research into causes and treatments. It should also lead to shifts in social attitudes, with less status obsession, and less stigmatization of the ‘less productive’.

Meanwhile, stop hoping, Foghead nation. Learn to live with the reality you are in. In the end you will live longer and better.

2 responses to “Foghead Nation”

raccoonburbleca says:June 1, 2024 at 9:19 am EditOne of the great things about doing a blog is the responses you get from people all over the world.It seems the trouble with accessing medical care is similar all over the world. At least, the Atlantisphere. It costs them more money to jerk people around than if they just got the job done.I had headaches a lot when I was younger. After a huge fight, I got surgery on my facial bones, to correct deformities from old injuries. Headaches completely went away.You have a very well done blog site. It is the thing people with chronic migraines need.Keep the flag flying.LikeReply

The Mindful Migraine Blog says:June 1, 2024 at 12:42 am EditOOmph! This is so relatable! I too am part of Foghead Nation, and have an “invisible” disability; chronic migraine. It affects my ability to work, drive, socialize, travel, parent, study… think. To be considered ‘chronic’ and have access to certain medications in Australia, you must have a migraine 15 days out of 30 – that’s 50%. BUT that’s not enough to be considered ‘disabled’ and therefore there are no government dispensations or allowances. 50% of my life is spent in bed but that’s not considered a life of non-ability??? For chronic migraine there is no “cure” all we can aim for is ‘remission’. For me, as you mentioned, this has been (sort of) achieved through mindfulness to regulate / recalibrate my nervous system. Even though 1 billion people are affected around the globe, funding is pitiful (probably because at least two thirds of patients are women). In terms of a ‘cure’ I am hopeful – 40 years ago there was NO treatments, now we have some… in another 40 I hope there is more – it will be too late for me, but my daughters might benefit. Hope that when you read this you are having an OK day – know that I am thinking of you and waving my little foggy-flag for you. Linda xoxLikeReply