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I wish that everyone wore masks, but as my wife and daughters regularly mix unmasked with other humans, it’s not really worth wearing one myself on rare excursions into public places.

Dawkins is complicated. He is opinionated on many issues and is vicious to anyone who disagrees with him on anything. There are plenty of evolutionary biologists and atheists who find his dogmatism unhelpful. I don’t know if he has said anything about ME. Like many crusaders against woo...

This looks like bog-standard culture war stuff: WSJ has clearly gone the same way as Murdoch’s UK broadsheet.

I’d hope and guess that the National Public Health Laboratory in Khartoum wouldn’t have the range of goodies that Porton Down or Aberdeen Proving Ground keep in special locked cupboards. Probably nothing scarier than the measles and cholera pathogens that the WHO release mentioned.

Another excellent article in the Graun today. I won’t link as it’s specifically party political. According to the Shaw Trust, which ranks her in the Disability Power 100, she “has generalised muscle weakness and uses a wheelchair”. Of course, she has a perfect right not to say anything...

This is going to sound horribly like gatekeeping, but I don’t like the potential consequences for pwME when things that sound like over-exertion or burnout get sympathetic attention and symptomatic definition.

I’m genuinely beginning to wonder about hostile state compromises of Hungarian dating apps. Malicious mismatching just shouldn’t be happening at that scale.

Good. Carry on picking fights with cardiologists. There are lots of them, some of whom are quite eminent, and they are all basically either plumbers or electricians, who couldn’t give a stuff what happens in patients’ heads.

Industry funding and sponsorship of academia is murky and subtle. So are log rolling and cliques. Stating one’s primary employer leaves an awful lot unsaid. It would definitely be helpful to allow open comment and attributable voting, I’m just saying that human editorial judgement has an...

Hmm. Most significant papers have authors from multiple universities, weakening the argument from brand protection, as it should be trivial to find at least one institution that will publish. Readers judging quality on the basis of the comments (and Trish’s “cream rising to the top”) sounds...

Is corrupt the right word, though? Parasitic, certainly. Unfair, in that patients and the public at large are paywalled out of research which impacts them. But I’m not sure that it’s corrupt: the evil genius of the current model is that it delivers a fair degree of probity at an eye-watering...

Roberts relies to some extent on that distinction, partly because it’s an acknowledged critique of the BPS model, but his novel line of attack is that the BPS model is not actually a model, and therefore cannot be adduced in any non-circular discussion of clinical cause and effect.

But surely it’s still in our interest for the BPS construction of CFS (as unexplained fatigue partly resulting from psychosocial triggers) to be delegitimised. It doesn’t really matter whether Roberts knows anything about PEM.

This is a joy to read. It’s proper applied philosophy, directed shrewdly at the weakest points of the BPS epistemic structure. I don’t think that Roberts’ validity attack on diseases which are named and identified in question-begging BPS terms necessarily prevents us from naming common clusters...

And working at home is physically less onerous than “light” housework. Not that improved nuance would likely have led to more interesting conclusions; the discussion above is noddy-level.

People who work in medicine and academia are obliged to use the honorifics specific to those professions appropriately and carefully. Laity confers freedom to use or ignore those titles as one wishes. Personally I’d only ever use a surname, and I admit it would certainly be fishy of someone to...

Precarious, though. He was about 100 years old when I first registered with the practice, and that was 20 years ago.

Yes. Point taken. Some of us are lucky: my GP has been supportive and happy to let me try out whatever pain relief I think appropriate. Mainly because he half-read something about mitochondria and adopted a biosomaticist stance. But it shouldn’t be a lottery like that, and advocacy in the...

Completely agree, but just on one minor point: we have symptomatic relief already. Painkillers and staying in bed and stuff. There’s not much more available for the comparable biomarked illnesses.

Absolutely this, and what @JemPD says above. And, sadly, the importance and need for this illness to be provable is only going to increase in the face of economic, demographic and political headwinds.