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The cure for superstition is education, in the sense of giving the public the tools to recognize the psychosomatic narrative as being false. The psychosomatic narrative relies heavily on PACE-like clinical trials which through positive results appear to confirm that is some truth to the illness...

It's just one particularly popular medical superstition of our age. I think people will be able to recognize it as such if we keep pointing this out.

As teenager I went to a hypnotherapist and lied about it helping me, out of a combination of pressure, conforming to what was expected, and wishful thinking. Children (and adults) tend to go along with the story presented to them, that the treatment will help them. That doesn't mean it actually...

Little information is needed to determine that with high likelihood, this therapy is no different than any other similar approaches and explanatory models, and likely to be an abusive mess. The basic idea is that the symptoms are an error and maintained by what the patient is doing, so...

The reason there is more pain is probably because in some ways we're getting unhealthier as society. Allergy, autoimmune, gut and brain diseases are more and more common. But that's not a nice thought, and a difficult problem, so people prefer to adopt these weird views that instantly suggest...

Faith in Cochrane lost. There is nothing defensible about the claims that CBT and GET work. All they're doing is giving endless benefit of doubt to people who have already demonstrated to be incompetent or dishonest.

Exclusive diagnostic criteria cannot be used to establish the prevalence anyway. They will only give a minimum prevalence because in the real world people tend to have more than one health issue. Neither can inclusive diagnostic criteria that are not tied to some reliable sign of the illness.

It sounds like the step were 93% of participants were considered to not have ME/CFS was this one. That could indicate a problem with the exclusion criteria in Fukuda, or some hidden problem with the procedure. According to the paper, the patients excluded at this step had neurological (n=280...

My guess is that the HADS scale was inappropriately used, resulting in a large portion of patients being diagnosed with depression. Fukuda excludes psychiatric disorders. Therefore most of the 654 patients diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder could have something like POTS or CFS instead. That...

I picture Chalder first explaining how patients are lazy, perfectionist, irrational, deluded, fearful to the point of self-inflicted disability, and then complaining how patient call her names on the internet. They've been negatively stereotyping patients for 30 years and can't handle taking...

No, it's medicine that is obsessed with imposing this on patients. They write articles on how to best trick and persuade patients to believe in something that is not real. There's also a business side to it.

I found the tilt table test useful because it helped me make sense of some of my symptoms and helps me stick to the treatment. My feeling is that orthostatic intolerance is probably hugely underdiagnosed. Some of those frustrating cases with vague nonspecific symptoms are going to be cases of...

Bringing in the IOM is an appeal to authority. However, the view that it's psychosomatic is also based on nothing but some self proclaimed experts saying it is so. As Diane points out, the IOM is considerably more authoritative than any of the people saying ME/CFS is psychosomatic. I don't know...

For what it's worth, that medicine clings to these 19th century ideas that never had any scientific basis tells us everything we need to know about how committed medicine really is to science and evidence. Committed only when it's convenient, not otherwise.

I just saw this on twitter

For what it's worth I do see a clear ethical problem. There is horrendous neglect of patients, and the very ideology that justifies it is the idea that this is somehow not a medical condition. If we patients make the distinction between biology and psychology, it is because we have experienced...

From a certain point of view, a "functional neurological disorder" is probably emotionally generated. It's a label given to patients by doctors that find it too difficult to admit that medicine hasn't figured everything out yet.

The funders, which are probably the taxpayers, are being defrauded.

Crazy Trudie and her delusions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1440612/ Assuming electrosensitivity is a real thing, the sham exposure may not have been a sham exposure.