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I need to access the full paper through college but I think there is something very interesting here. It is the sort of thing David Poeppel has worked on. The impression tends to be given that 'maps' of cell responses in brain tissue are 'representations' like ordinary maps or pictures, which...

I don't quite understand what they are claiming but it is an interesting thing to flag up!

This does not sound like anything to do with EDS. It is unfortunate that the EDS society seems to got sucked in to all sorts of pseudoscience lead by Alan Hakim and Co..

These antibodies are found in everyone, unfortunately. I have discussed them at length with Angela Vincent who is probably the world authority on autoantibodies in neurological disease. She regards them as an artefact of no real interest. A very specific subset of antibodies may be causally...

The appropriate word would be 'rebutted' rather than refuted I think.

I think this is highly speculative and almost certainly invalid. The idea of 'bad' B cells has been around since about 2000 and has never made any sense. It was started off by some very dodgy interpretation of mouse experiments. Any B cell can go through a double negative memory phase. These are...

The only thing I have ever doubted about Monbiot is whether the brutally consistent nature of his moral stance sometimes misses realities to do with the messiness of social justice. I have never noticed him pushing stuff with a dubious evidence base. My impression from interacting with him is...

So maybe this is complementary medicine marketing network?

An interesting point and yes, there is an awfully commercial feel about the linked material.

This is basically the reason why in my expert witness testimony to NICE I said that further use of exercise therapy and psychotherapy forME was unethical because it involved dishonesty in the way the treatments were presented.

I am afraid I think that the author has got the wrong end of a bunch of sticks. I never met a patient with rheumatoid arthritis who described their problems anything like this. This sounds like a story made of cut and paste out of magazine articles or internet posts. Malaise is not a cause of...

We have absolutely no reason to think it was other than co-incidence. Credence to things like this is the problem.

We aren't going to get anywhere with this on a forum list. Just the bit I have quoted of you above glosses over fundamental conceptual divides that we have all been used to thinking we can just skim over. It doesn't work The interesting thing is that in other bits of biomedicine, like...

But you are conflating. What is 'understanding of the world'. The philosopher of mind Tim Crane has written quite a bit about this but the key thing is that there are two quite different aspects to beliefs and other so-called 'propositional attitudes'. There is a dispositional state that is...

NO I think this is where the bogus science blankets almost everything. There is no such thing as a 'cognition' or indeed an 'emotion' in science. Science deals with dynamic causal processes - what we call body if you like. It also all the time deals with experiences - thoughts, feelings, etc...

Well, Monbiot should be getting his head around the stuff now. I recommended he looked at the Turner-Stokes and Busse debacle a day or two ago. Now Sharpe is piling on the irony. These are REAL experts it seems.

By the way the draft NICE evidence review is not accepted by those with a vested interest in not liking it. So?

What would a behavioural component be though? That seems to beg questions.

They should be very aware of it but not believe in it! -ologies are supposed to discard magic.

I was very careful to start with some caveats. Firstly that the topic needs a lot of unpacking. Secondly that I was trying to respond in the sense that the journalist used the phrase and wanted my opinion. I think @Peter Trewhitt hits the nail on the head here. I was specifically being asked...