Search results

I presume you mean the FINE trial. (Yes, it was a nice, fine trial wasn't it!)

I saw a graph of this once with two curves. One curve was the number of people in mental hospitals, the other the number in prisons, versus time. As the first went down (due to the care in the community policy), the second went up to match.

Pity his responses were so shallow.

Wow. I had no idea I was just reflecting Popper. Had only known the name as being connected with philosophy of science but just felt compelled to read the wikipedia page on him https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper Seems relevant here.

There is a big difference though. Progress in quantum mechanics looks like: strange phenomenon observed; many theories postulated to explain; predictions are made from those theories; predictions are compared with old experiments or new experiments performed to test predictions; theories that...

But this would only happen if people don't recover. So it could be interpreted as evidence of very low rate of recovery.

It seems to me that the response to point 3 regarding subjective measures in unblinded trials focussed only on the subjective measures and did not consider the consequences of combining that with lack of blinding. I think this is the strongest point with the weakest response. It should be made...

I think that's a dangerous way to think and has something of the 'appeal to authority' logical fallacy about it. Many years ago when I had only been sick for a couple of years, I had to see a psychiatrist who was a professor in a top Australian university in order to get a temporary disability...

I get the impression that there is no place in the Cochrane structure for an illness where so little is really known about it's cause.

Was the first an extended abstract from a conference proceedings while the latest is the actual paper with all the details?

I have often wondered this. The aspect that I want to see explained in a working model is why do I get this achy leg muscle feeling from purely too much cognitive effort.

Couldn't this simply reflect the long time taken to get a diagnosis, especially in gradual onset cases? I suspect that, if sudden and gradual onset were separated, the marked increase in consultations in years preceding diagnosis would be much reduced or nonexistent in the sudden onset group.

I would think the speed measuring code (eg, javascript) would run locally on your device and not be affected by internet speed.

I presume the latest guidelines are these from 2002 https://www.mja.com.au/system/files/issues/cfs2_2.pdf I have only quickly skimmed them but they are not as bad as I thought they were. For example, the section The role of rehabilitation, behavioural and cognitive treatment approaches...

I haven't looked but my recollection is that the current guidelines are not very good. If "update" means start again without the CBT/GET idealogues having any say then I guess this recommendation could be ok. But to just say "update" seems a little underwhelming to me.

I think that's called gaslighting.

Reading that quote from the TMG minutes again, I was struck by If patients are reasonably active doesn't that suggest a theory of deconditioning may not be well founded? I guess that's what happens when you become so wedded to a belief that you just don't even see the evidence that contradicts it.

I think magicians (i.e., professional cold readers, etc) should form the control group if the research was to be meaningful.

The abstract sounds like they compared a hypothetical person with tiredness symptoms and no diagnosis to one with tiredness symptoms and a CFS diagnosis. Sort of a no brainer. A comparison with a range of alternative labels (ME, SEID) may have started to be interesting.

In the conclusion: Nice to see the PACE trial used as an established example of poor science in the field of psychosomatic medicine.