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That's a worry. Can anyone contact the MEA, @Russell Fleming? It seems that whoever is making editorial decisions there is not very aware of, well, much, about ME/CFS and the potential for uninformed people to take advantage of people newly diagnosed with ME/CFS. I mean, it's not just that...

I've heard much odder ideas about the cause of ME/CFS. It's interesting to think about. I assume tonsils are primarily there for immune function. But, I've googled and I've seen some of that research you mention that suggests that appendices might also affect immune responses. There's this...

Canada: Edmonton Long covid clinic - Park Integrative Health, Neeja Bakshi Here, an example from today of a medical doctor who is specialising in treating Long Covid and uses acupuncture as a treatment. Decent trials could be done on humans, to stop people wasting money and effort on useless...

From the twitter thread, Dr Bakshi has Long Covid herself. She knows what PEM is She is obviously sympathetic and goes into bat with insurance companies for her patients: But I find the list of treatments rather sad - rehabilitation, LDN? acupuncture? Where's the evidence? It feels as...

An article about the clinic, Park Integrative Health Specialized clinics to treat long COVID are in demand and physicians say they can't keep up Jun 2022

Yeah, I laughed out loud when I got to the last bit of the title. And then felt sad for the rats. I had to google to get the reference - for the benefit of others not very familiar with UK history, it's about burning cakes As ridiculous as this research is, we are still seeing otherwise...

A very warm welcome to the forum @Veronica.

Achingly sad poems. Veronica might be physically limited but her poems soar out across the world. I spent some time thinking about the use of amber in that last poem, 'in the amber country of my ancestors' - it sounds so warm and nostalgic. But, when I found out a bit more about Ukrainian...

If we are talking about about the same letter, my memory of this is that actually a journalist made a letter with pasted cutout letters, mashing together some of the things that Wessely claimed, to use as an illustration in an article about the awful ME activists and the saintly researchers who...

The structure of the study is good, with the ME/CFS subset and the healthy post-Covid-19 controls. It's notable that lower levels of autoantibodies were found in the Long Covid people, compared to the other groups. I haven't looked at the paper yet, but the results (e.g. "compared to at least...

I don't recall the details well, but I'm pretty sure that the mug was not thrown at anyone, researcher or otherwise. I vaguely recall that the mug was assisted to fall to the floor as the person was leaving. My memory of the account is that, as an act of physical violence, it was of the...

Yes, this is the epitome of re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The ship still sinks even when people are seated in groups according to how much they worry about icebergs. I'm actually a bit surprised that Clapperton did not find anything. I mean, for one thing there must have been a big...

Getting to the molecule that was proclaimed as a biomarker in the abstract: Complement C4a level First activity challenge Baseline: ME/CFS 1790.4 ± 424.3 Controls 1901.8 ± 398.4 1 hour Post-exercise: ME/CFS 1645.9 ± 503.6 Controls 1654.5 ± 399.9 Because the drop in C4a coincided...

IL-1β They didn't find any detectable IL-1B before or after either bouts of exercise in the ME/CFS group of the controls. This was in line with the study that was Reference 10 - and that study made measurements at more time points than just 1 hour after exercise. This is quite funny, as the...

First I note the very short duration of the exercise. 4 minutes or so of cycling. I think that the impact of this exercise challenge could get lost in the noise of the other activity of the person's day including the effort of getting to the test facility. Check out the differences in RER...

That's quite a big and consequential statement, but it's oddly downplayed in the conclusions where the researchers just call for more study of immune alterations. So, what did they actually find? Well, I haven't got to what they found yet, but I just have to divert briefly to note this...

First sentence of the paper. The researchers don't see PEM as a mandatory diagnostic criteria for ME/CFS. Also the framing of "bad" exercise or activity is that it is "too vigorous". Actually, we don't know if a short burst of vigorous activity is worse or better than a longer period of...

Gosh, the researchers must have been relieved - with a p of 0.049 that finding came perilously close to being statistically insignificant. But, with adiposity, smoking and poor sleep partially explaining 'prospective CRP increases', maybe if you took those things out of the equation, there'd be...

Not to diminish the awfulness of chronic illness and the losses, and the additional impact of being disbelieved and stigmatised, but I do think that the handing out of anti-depressants with little followup or monitoring for side effects or information about the problems that come with ceasing...

PACE was about people with long lasting fatigue. I don't think that alone automatically makes the evidence it produces worthless. PACE showed that CBT and GET can't be expected to help people with long-lasting fatigue. It's the same as having a trial on pain relief and including people with a...