Search results

True, there has been an awful lot of ME news that they have ignored over the years when it does not suit their BPS heroes.

I see it as a positive that some 35% appear to be ‘recovered’, though this is much less than the general medical opinion of most children recovering, but how on Earth can they conclude from the fact that current service provision has failed to cure 65% that what is needed is yet more of the...

What will be interesting is who the Science Media Centre roll out on Wednesday morning. In the past as well as the usual suspects they usually have been also able to co-opt a few of the great and the good not directly involved in the ME/CFS, for example Dorothy Bishop’s endorsement the Smile...

A number of studies of ME, eg PACE, found improvement on long term follow up in their ‘no treatment’ controls. Unless you eliminate bias and have meaningful controls none of these studies tell us anything.

My understanding is that it is illegal under the Trade Descriptions Act in the UK, and that this was formally recognised following a court case. The legal situation may be different in other countries. Presumably the recent research including this study may have the effect of muddying the...

Also the issue of how soon post treatment this intervention takes place is relevant, as cancer treatment may impair the immune system, leaving survivors at, albeit temporarily, higher risk of adventitious infections. It is vital not to instruct patients to ignore symptoms or to leave them...

It is suggestive of an underlying biomedical condition, but not proof. People who believe they can fly without mechanical aids (eg aeroplanes) may have lots of broken legs, which is a biomedical consequence, though presumably a psychological diagnosis remains the most important one. (Added -...

I think it is permissible to argue, that the fact the aetiology of ME is not understood is not a justification for using psychological and behavioural interventions to try to cure the condition itself, rather than supporting patients in a situation where we have no evidence based treatments...

This doesn’t seem to have prevented decades of mistreatment of other conditions, including ME.

Given the study only looked at self reported measures how can they say ‘explicit improvement in … energy level’, especially given an explicit intention of the intervention is to change how participants perceive and report their symptoms. Given at worst participants are explicitly instructed...

Although my above comment is perhaps stating the obvious, my intention was to convey the idea that much/most BPS research into ME/CFS has never arisen out of an attempt to understand the clinical reality experienced by patients, something that has become even more obvious in the catch-all...

I have no specific knowledge re the NICE guidelines, though usually such embargoes end in the very early hours of the morning to allow the first editions of the morning papers to include relevant news stories.

Such a definition is in effect asserting that all the symptoms of ME/CFS are ‘impairment of functioning’ resulting from ‘persistent fatigue’. This is an unevidenced and implausible hypothesis, especially as many symptoms such as orthostatic intolerance occur independent of any level of fatigue...

Also the inverse should be asked, why does absolutely everyone who has ever had a substantial illness not develop idiopathic chronic fatigue as well a host of other chronic symptoms resulting from associative learning?

I don’t know how widespread this is and it may be out of date now, but the Sheffield CFS/ME did not accept referrals unless a consultant had already given the diagnosis. When I was referred to the Sheffield service, a considerable number of years after my original diagnosis (15 years plus) and...

Though obviously also part of our cultural obsession with formal exercise, this also reflects how modern medicine approaches rehabilitation. We take people away into a separate location and work on any impairment in abstraction, more often than not on the assumption that the patient will...

Possibly a red herring, but … Surely ‘exercise’ is an activity, but an activity that is primarily undertaken for its own sake rather than for an independent objective. Personally I would classify ‘exercise’ as a leisure activity, though one our society collectively fetishises as necessary to...

If handled properly it is not unacceptable for researchers to say we got the design of our investigation wrong, and we believe that an alternative analysis of the data produces more interesting results, and then allowing other people to make their own mind on this. However to play down the...

As we are in ‘the silly season’ who knows what will happen next week. With most of the political apparatus on its Summer holidays, media outlets are on the look out for the weird and wonderful or the unusual to fill their slots. (I noticed three alien/flying saucer stories on my Facebook feed...

Also, if the previous evidence for GET/CBT was so convincing, why was the PACE study with government funding needed to provide an unequivocal answer to question of the usefulness of GET/CBT (and why did it it take so long for people to realise that PACE provided unequivocal evidence that GET/CBT...