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Here is a youtube playlist of another person before and after the surgery. They have EDS and had the following key symptoms - neck pain, headache, brain fog, severe fatigue, mild hand tremor and ataxia.

A key point still is that Jeff and Jen ended up developing symptoms that are quite atypical of ME or CFS. I don't see why it is controversial to believe that their symptoms were due to CCI and that surgery was the cause of the remission. Perhaps they had rare atypical presentations of CCI -...

It makes me wonder, have there been any animal models of disease that have actually led to effective treatments in humans? I'm guessing the list is quite short?

He's saying that ME does have clear signs. It is only invisible if you don't care to look.

I was specifically referring to the performance at the ventilatory threshold, not VO2Peak. The conclusions that the authors are making about VO2Peak are assuming that patients and controls actually achieved their VO2Max, something which I am sceptical about. Why would we assume that patients...

I think it is important not to speculate as to the reasons why until we are told more details...

Yes, the real placebo effect is a transient reduction in pain due to conditioning of the bodies endorphin system. There is some biological evidence of this. This system has obvious evolutionary advantage, namely being able to temporarily suppress pain for the purpose of escaping danger.

Yes, an RER of 1 or 1.1 or whatever does not indicate that participants have necessarily reached a true VO2Max. To clarify my view, I do believe that the true VO2Max on the second day in patients will be lower than the first day, but methodological constraints means this is hard to capture...

The ventilatory threshold is much more interesting than merely the turning point to anerobic energy production. So much more is going on at that point, including increased neural drive from the brain, recruitment of substantially more muscle fibres and there is also an autonomic response -...

Many patients in these studies were not exercised enough to reach true VO2Max. RER=1.1, age predicted HR etc are merely suggestive. Patients have to be pushed harder in terms of perceived exertion (which is basically central drive) to achieve VO2Max and the level of encouragement etc is...

This study did reproduce the major consistent finding so far: reduced performance at the ventilatory threshold. The 8th study so far if we include the study based on a single pair of twins. The VO2Peak findings have been inconsistent because patients have not been consistently exercising to...

Regression to the mean is not a placebo effect, it is a bias that is often falsely attributed to the placebo effect.

I was under the impression that the blog post was the article, just not in print yet.

The "placebo response" in patients is highly likely to be the same as it is in any other group of people. The problem is a variety of reporting biases are being bundled up as a "placebo effect" and then claiming that the placebo effect* is magically high in some cases and low in others. When the...

It means that patients performed better on the 2nd CPET (72 hours after) than the first CPET, so there was no effect of PEM on performance after 72 hours. There is generally a mild performance increase the second time a person does a CPET, basically because they are more familiar with what they...

Again, how does that explain this? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15784798

Or is the same old cognitive mistake that many of us make? Assume your preconceptions are correct and try to cherry pick the facts to suit.

Wessely/Deale/Chalder 1995 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7709961 Which is totally contradictory to their conclusion from their review of "placebo" responses in clinical trials: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15784798 He also seems to be quite aware that patients don't actually...

Yes, as I said in my first post - all the hate demonstrated against antivaxxers on the internet is hardly going to change their mind. All of those people going on nasty tirades against antivaxxers on the internet, are at best, are wasting their time.

Looking at Sharpe's piece, it seems those standards are fairly low.