"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.
The AIDS example here is using a known AIDS/HIV denialist (who is also not a medical doctor, but a psychoanalyst), and does not represent the consensus view at the time. That same year, the NIH and Department of Health and Human Services had announced that there was a probable link between a virus (HTLV, later HIV) and AIDS [1].
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.
That's backwards. Psychogenic illness is when one reports an ailment, but doctors can find no physical cause and/or don't even believe the patient's report. Korean fan death is a belief that something will make you ill when it won't. (I can say this because my family and I would be dead many times over. I've run the experiment, so to speak.) Not the same thing, not even the same sort of thing.
You can be dismissive of fan-death, but please know that the people who believe in it do so more out of national identity than reason. I have met many very smart lovely people who believed in it. Think of it more as regional pride in local barbecue than an actual belief. That said South Korea is far too hot in the summer to have a fan shut off automatically.
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.
>some kind of nationalistic pedestal of overdramatic belief systems that make you Korean
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.
Imperial units are used because they're generally easier to relate to and use than the metric counterparts- simpler divisors, that sort of thing. It's the same reason we have 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds.
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.
Does it? Really? Should I be worried about Korean fan-death?