Search results

The Wikipedia entry leaves out a lot of the political background. From what I have read it was extremely convenient for the US administration to find an argument for withdrawing from the embassy. We are familiar with governments setting up committees that come to comfortable conclusions - as for...

That will be it. Yup, NHS covers hearing aids if you are deaf. And you don't need to be that deaf. My GP said the main problem was that deaf people didn't think to ask - which probably meant that aids were not deducted from his budget but paid for centrally. The system is that you get the...

A very good point. Things only need to be prescription - only if potentially harmful. I wonder if the people marketing it realise this. I suspect that indeed this is a clever ruse for making it look as if the treatment is somehow 'official' and therefore a must-have for the NHS. I guess it is...

Yes this is not helpful out of context. Subjective measures are fine under the right conditions.

So everyone, what is the evidence? The evidence is STRONG, yes the evidence is STRONG and there is so much of it praise ye praise ye. How wonderful CBT is. If one ever wondered if the evidence base for CBT was bullshit this allows one to stop wondering. The level of this is so low that ten year...

I wasn't intending to reassure!

Sorry I meant Alistair Santhouse, I can never get his name right- psychiatrist at King's/Maudesley.

Interesting to listen to Suzanne O'Sullivan. My overall impression is that intuitively she has a reasonable grasp of the complexity of the problem but that rather than saying anything new or useful she is getting herself tied in the same pseudoscientific knots as Stone and Mark Edwards. The...

That little Wikipedia entry shows just what a can of worms this is. So maybe the word did indeed get about that doctors were diagnosing this illness so others developed the same. I think Whipple tries to make a good point in this respect - that it seems that all this theorising is helping...

I like the cameo of Michael Sharpe. But is there much point in giving advice on how to behave nicely and rationally when the nice rational people always did and the problem is those who have no interest in that, and precious few who give such advice seem to practice what they preach. Why is...

I looked up the etymology of 'spiritual'. This is something I deal with in my philosophy writing and I wanted to check here the word arises. It turns out that this is one of those words which has three forms and the meaning can change dramatically between the first and third form leaving the...

I do too. In a sense the last paragraph changes that. Whipple is really saying: This is a superb study of the many strange ways that psychosomatic illnesses manifest themselves, and it's probably all your bloody fault, Sullivan" but I don't think he says it in a way that most readers will twig...

Unlike the psychiatrists I try not to pretend that I actually know what is going on.But my guess would be that there are two factors. The first is the response of a girl's brain to being in an extremely confusing and threatening environment. The culture dislocation in Sweden may even be more...

It is one of those things you can access if yo are lucky by a free trial. Not sure if there is a way round that. The first bit: It seems fair to say that grisi siknis was named before doctors worried too much about the niceties of political correctness. This disease mainly afflicts teenage...

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-sleeping-beauties-by-suzanne-o-sullivan-review-29kq7wdtb Interesting article by Whipple on a book by Suzanne Sullivan. Essentially Whipple accepts Sullivan's claim that there are illnesses due to the idea of having the illness. The clearest example is...

So the truth comes out. Exactly what Sandford said at the RSM meeting chaired by Fiona Godlee some years back. We have to have rehabilitation because it is the only the we've got apart from time. We have to sell something to keep in business, we cannot just allow people to recover on their own...

I don't think so because I don't think it exists. Around 1980 when rheumatology became a serious medical specialty instead of just a dumping ground for the disabled we looked at these diagnoses and realised that they were made up. There is no chondritis. There were one or two probably quite...