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That's it! - we could patent the method. It would solve all the BPS problems.

It is odd. Apparently 1961 but UCL archives have Psychoanalytic Review 1913-1957 and 1963-date.

A drug would certainly get licensed on those odds but this study does nothing to indicate that anyone benefited from exercise because it has no controls. Patients probably said they had less fatigue to be polite and if they were fitter who cares if their ME is the same?

What would be the reasoning for that conclusion? If 51% had PEM maybe 49% did not have ME? But then some PWME may have battered on. I am not convinced this study can tell us anything. It is such a pity that studies are set up in such a confused way. Without controls I don't think it tells us...

I have spoken to one journalist who seems to be on the ball and ready to produce something - although the emphasis may be on slightly different priorities from those often discussed here. I may be speaking to another journalist later.

Interesting to compare this with the ME/CFS draft guideline. For pain there is no documentation of evidence, just some waffle about evidence being positive. Presumably this is a different level of exercise? I get the clear impression that the pain patient community do not have the sort of...

Very very much so. It is intriguing that paired test treatments always seem to come out exactly the same. If you try two unvalidated treatments what would be the chances that they would actually be more or less identical in efficacy - close to zero. Yet for PACE and here the test groups show...

Maybe I should look at it. The great majority of reviews are positive and from migraine sufferers. It seems that Sacks does not give an answer but reviews the history? Presumably that has to involve mentioning psychosomatic theories.

Is anyone familiar wit the trial literature for chronic pain? What is the pain equivalent of PACE I wonder? Pain would seem to pose an even bigger methodological problem since it is subjective all the way.

Yes, I think there must be a similar concept of some unconscious phantom consciousness that works out that it wants to have fits. My point is that if its unconscious it isn't phantom or a consciousness but just a brain computing results. She does of course given explanation of how it happens...

Exactly, malingering is the mind making someone seem sick (to others). This is excluded from the usual understanding of psychosomatic but perhaps it is the only real situation where the mind is at least making people get diagnosed with an illness. And various sources suggest that 'resignation...

Maybe just leave it there?

Well Paul Garner seemed to claim that his being wimpish and following the advice of ME losers made him go on being fatigued. But of course at the time he was not aware of that!

This I would actually disagree with since it is the area of neuroscience I work on. We have very plausible mechanisms for brains producing pains or fits or fatigue or whatever you like. All the things we are aware of are patterns of symbols that the brain constructs using inferences based on...

I don't think it is quite as simple as that. But I certainly think that talking of the mind making you sick is unhelpful. The mind can make people seem sick. The most obvious example is malingering, which is obviously a real phenomenon. The brain can make people sick - with hallucinations or...

Not in my experience. It just looks dumb to me to make these claims.

In fact I realised that it might seem paradoxical. In both cases the report was politically convenient. But what was convenient was very different on the two occasions!

I don't remember what Wessely's exact conclusion was. I thought he had pretty much dismissed any specific cause - or used some sort of bio and psycho waffle to explain it away. Whatever he said the government managed to do nothing and bury it. Edit: In his article 'Ten Years On' he concludes...

On the Andrew Marr programme on the radio O'Sullivan was compared to Oliver Sacks. However, my memory of Sacks's books was that he presented the strange world of neurology with genuine sympathy and no claim to explain with psychologising. The man who mistook his wife for a hat must have been...

The final column: 'Although she writes with compassion, O'Sullivan's book will anger many, not least, I suspect, its subjects. Almost all of those she visits reject the idea that their disease is psychosomatic.In all cases there are competing explanations, albeit some that involve demons. There...