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It's ironic that this trial is about "personalised" interventions but all the participants get the same advice, while a genuinely personalised offer of help would look at individual things that might make a serious difference to someone's health and QoL, like 'do you need care support or home...

yes, good point. Especially in a world where politicians answer questions about rising rates of long-term ill health with "clearly their benefits are too generous."

If they genuinely wanted to assess the effectiveness of things like this for people with multiple long-term conditions, they'd be looking at outcomes over years, not months. "But but but we can't do that because there are too many variables and we'd have to commit too many resources and we...

Maybe it's the brain fog, but I can't see anything at all in the article that justifies the headline.

exactly! - and even these sick people were capable of repeatedly doing enough tiring physical exercise to be included in the study, while other Long Covid patients can't even leave their beds. Yet these researchers think they've "comprehensively investigate[d] the physiologic mechanisms...

This sort of mess just emphasises how utterly pointless it is to go on treating everyone who comes under the umbrella of Long Covid as if they had the same needs and conditions. Ridiculous categorical pronouncements that mean absolutely nothing to individuals in practice.

But there are NHS neurologists right now trying to put a FND diagnosis on patients who present with brain fog and fatigue, without any of the signs you list (I've encountered one myself within the past six months and heard of others). So either they do think it's appropriate, or they're just...

Cambridge and Peterborough LC clinic: according to this, 53% of their patients present with "Functional illness", 9% with FND and 4% with ME. Using a "mind-body approach"...

Tiny sample size, no control group, Fukuda criteria, and what look like very outdated references on the background of CFS, efficacy or otherwise of CBT and so on.

If the authors' aim is for HCPs to be clearer about the diagnostic criteria for FND and thus more confident in communicating that diagnosis to patients, the logical outcome would be that they make that diagnosis less often, because they'll only be making it in cases that are unambiguous (where...

It really is. There is so much we could be finding out, right now, if the official attitude didn't boil down to "go away, calm down and wait for it to blow over".

"The biological factors in PCC, such as immune activation, might be the result of a conditioning mechanism by chronic stress" ... if we ignore all the cases in which there was no chronic stress. No need to even think about them. Just stick our fingers in our ears and sing la la la and they'll...

"few or no" is a great phrase. "Your honour, my client has committed few or no crimes."

"Further investigation and replication is warranted" gotta keep that grant money coming.

I've been a keen amateur dancer all my life but now I can't move in time at all. I guess it's the same problem as whatever it is that makes it difficult to be accurately aware of longer periods of time passing, where you can feel as if 15 minutes has passed but it's actually been two hours or...

As the authors say here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-023-00904-7

That's a lot of public money being spent on things with no evidence base.

Histamine blockers are among the most commonly prescribed things for Long Covid. If they were gamechangers we'd know it by now.

So they've found that X is associated with lower Y and their conclusion is that X "reduces" Y.

Are there any other diseases where a researcher would think it was acceptable to say they've discovered the fundamental mechanism while completely ignoring one of the disease's defining features?