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If men have a higher inflammatory response than women it means that there is not a simple relationship between damage and inflammation so less inflammation does not always mean more healthy tissue. If producing inflammation is a dynamic response, then looking for it in ME may be like looking at...

These questionnaires are just lists of all the things they believe are caused by central sensitization then asking if people have them. You could do the same for the presence of individual guardian angels - Have you ever experienced a near miss of an accident? Have you had second thoughts...

The BPS people have been trying, and succeeding to a large extent, to get other fatiguing illnesses to believe that their fatigue is the same as ME and so it can be cured as proven by the PACE trial. MS has been conquered and the RA society was funding BPS studies even before them. I don't now...

The description of ME has been widened and widened. When I was first diagnosed it was thought to have a prevalence of about 0.5%, now we have Crawley saying it is about 2.4%. Do they really all have the same disease? Wessely's stated aim was to make ME disappear. It has been lost within a...

My parents, born in 1929 were thin as were most people with a certain variation for genetics. My gran was overweight but she had had 13 children. The reasons for the difference between then and now are maybe not the obvious. Firstly, they had much more physical lives but they also had most...

I wouldn't worry too much. Comments under articles about all sorts of things are often awful as the trolls and those who disagree are most likely to post.

As is typical in papers about FND I can't make sense of this statement (or much of the rest!) If they mean that people with a lot of ill health can be emotional about things they should have used a control group with uncontested physical illness in case it is the fact of being ill that is the...

The case of type 2 diabetes holds a warning for ME. The explicit talk of mother fixation or an anal personality is unlikely to get very far today but blame lifestyle or moral choice and it is accepted without challenge. I am not feeling well enough today to track down the details but there was...

I may be using the terminology wrong, it happens when you have to work out a disease for yourself without medical input. It would have been good to be able to discuss these things with someone knowledgeable fifty years ago! Symptoms I experienced were considered a common part of ME when I was...

So it was useless but well tolerated :banghead::banghead::banghead: The positive bit is put first as usual but nothing else counts except it didn't work. Reminds me of that joke. The bad news is there is only camel dung to eat. The good news is there is plenty of it.

Maybe they don't believe it anymore, but I remember the analogy being that if a nerve is cut it often grows back where instead of being like the arm, a single strong thread, you get nervelets like the fingers which are fragile but each strand carries a full pain signal so pain is increased...

ME has always had dysautonomia as a symptom and POTS and OI are just aspects of that.

From hearing about the experiences of many people with ME I feel it is vital that new patients know it is a disease that is usually life long because people have thought they were well and then crashed to a lower level than before. The important thing is to avoid severe and especially very...

Conspiracy just means that that more than one person works together for a common goal. It only became an insult when the CIA set out to fight researchers who felt that Oswald did not kill Kennedy on his own. In the ME community we have reached the point where we need to be convinced that there...

Wow, that is even worse than I thought of her! I can't watch videos and find them upsetting anyway. Good for you and Esther 12 for taking the trouble for the rest of us.

Crawley gave a lecture where she talk about abuse she had experienced - in which she included the outreach from patients to the likes of Barnardos and the NSPCC to try to stop the trial of the LP on children as young as eight - while in the background there was a projection of a death threat...

These blogs are really, really good. Having all these dreadful ideas in one place is a wonderful resource to use when people are talking about FND and MUS and all the other letters used as euphemisms for neurotic and hysterical. For myself, I particularly like the way the horrendous...

A number of posts have been moved from Paul Garner on Long Covid and ME/CFS - BMJ articles and other media. The issue of what a newly diagnosed person should be told about prognosis is covered specifically in this Members Only thread: The question of “hope”. Dokagirl said When I was first...

Reseaarchers into FND are not playing the game and actually referring to the "disease" as a new name for conversion disorder, which is a form of hysteria, in their published papers. The older BPWS people know to imply things rather than spell it out so you can disown it when people complain.

This is the other side of the psychosomatic quack theories. The proponents have convinced doctors that patients will develop an illness if they hear about it so giving them a name to latch onto will make them worse. Horror, they may even join a support group and doom themselves to a lifetime of...