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Yes, it is complicated. I am being a bit unfair @Woolie, because I have recently published something in Frontiers in Psychology on the structure of mental representations. (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/jonathan-edwards/publications/distinguishingrepresentations.pdf) I think we can be fairly sure that...

This is clearly not the case, would you agree? My thoughts do not involve language at all in general.

So this rather tells the lie to the claim by psychiatrists that most patients love their doctors and their therapists and the people who cause trouble are a tiny fringe minority of nutcases. It seems that they are expecting quite a lot of patients to be dissatisfied with the behaviour of their...

Part of the problem seems to be that anyone with an acute febrile illness in the hospital and a whiff of some neurological symptoms got put down as one of the outbreak cohort. But the impression from McE and B I got was that of the rather few cases with symptoms that might have been interpreted...

I appreciate your fervour @Mithriel, but I think it is important to take the evidence on its merits. As someone trained in neurology I recognise the analysis McE and B make as in line with reliable practice. In contrast, Ramsay's account is vague and pretty implausible at times. To describe so...

But which is the 'commonly accepted wisdom'? The relevance of the outbreaks for me is that they distract from a useful scientific discussion of ME as it affects hundreds of thousands of people today and thereby distract from useful advocacy. My feeling is that if ME advocacy literature refers...

I was assuming people would assume the choice was 1-9! It could have been 1-100. The conclusion remains the same!

I suspect McE and B did not think these were worth commenting on because they would simply suggest that the subjects had a viral illness, as hospital workers are likely to several times a year. I think they were suggesting that the evidence for an encephalomyelitis may have been explained by...

Horton makes the best advertisement for his own abolition. What on earth does he mean by defending the rights of the community they serve - keeping everything chummy in the old boys' club? The sooner he goes the better.

It reminds me of a thought that passed through my mind n relation to a colleague who shall remain anonymous. I could see why one might want to be important. I could see why one might want to be a rheumatologist. But I could not see why anyone should want to be an 'important rheumatologist'...

Interesting how wrong you can be. "He discovered (WRONG) that by combining cognitive behavioural therapy and light exercise (WRONG) a third of patients make a full recovery (WRONG again)."

I don't remember McE and B referring to EEG (unfortunately I did not download the paper so would have to go back through my college access). They mention EMG and point out that the putative odd findings were not abnormal. I think they are right on that.

It could, but it does seem that these outbreaks affected hospital workers much more specifically than other post-infective illnesses. Reiter's, for instance, was first described in a troop ship of (male) soldiers. Hepatitis A was notoriously found in homes for children with learning...

I don't get the first bit. McE and B are putting up the hypothesis that a lot of these 'outbreaks' involved suggestibility or altered medical perception. Altered medical perception might well go with a nurse population. Suggestibility has been recorded as predominantly affecting young females...

The quote does not seem that unreasonable. If I remember rightly several of the outbreaks had a high proportion of hospital staff, especially nurses. That points to a significant proportion of them involving a factor relating to those populations. "A lot" is a reasonable way of saying that...

So he is happy to admit he is a phoney doctor. Nice to be able to fix things on a neurological level.

People who recover with 'non-medical' approaches would be more credible if they did not show such clear evidence of brainwashing. Something of importance to say can usually be said in a variety of different ways. But, just like the holy trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit...

Yes, that is what I was meaning.

Yes, I see that. But I am not concerned with 'bias by the participant' so much as influence on the metabolic pattern by signals such as cytokines that have nothing to do with the inherent metabolic capacity of the muscle or mitochondria. CPET is being used as a marker of lack of metabolic...

The gas comes from the muscle (or goes to it) so yes it does reflect muscle chemistry!