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It would be called patient conversion therapy. The goal would be to get the patient to stop identifying as chronically ill and disabled person that requires appropriate care. There's this magical thinking that thoughts create (biological) reality. You all know that one of the proponents of gay...

Excellent video.

@Lucibee May I suggest a virology guest post @dave30th?

I doubt that insurance companies would demand that. They would risk handing the patient proof of disability on a silver platter.

It is also important to try and catch PEM and orthostatic intollerance early on in patients with unexplained fatigue because that can prevent unnecessary suffering and may improve the prognosis.

If it gets better with eating it's probably hypoglycemia. Becoming very hungry during these episodes would also indicate hypoglycemia. That hands start shaking is consistent with hypoglycemia too. I second the suggestion to eat small frequent balanced meals and to avoid consuming sugars alone...

There are good reasons to think that many of the patients the CBT/GET proponents are working with do experience PEM. This is apparent from the CBT/GET proponents having written much about "setbacks" and "boom and bust behaviour". In my eyes these refer to PEM. The patients they are working with...

The diagnostic criteria probably do matter in the sense that patients who are less impaired are more easily manipulated into reporting improved health. That doesn't mean they never had ME or CFS to begin with or that they are genuinely improving. In case it is not clear, I fully agree with the...

My message to NICE on this topic would be something along these lines: The exact reliability criteria (as I call them here) would be determined by Science for ME. They would not be controversial or innovative, but mostly what is done in other areas of research, with a few ME specific...

I think it would be hard to make misleading claims if treatments had to demonstrate an increase in activity levels that is sustained for 8 months, with daily step count measurements taken for 1-2 weeks every 1-2 months, or an abnormal pre-treatment 2 day CPET that becomes more normal (possibly...

Agreed, but merely asking for "objective" outcomes could still leave the door wide open for misleading claims. We need to clearly define what constitutes reliable outcomes and demand that current and future evidence be held to this standard. Any loopholes will be exploited. While we are at it...

Designing a reliable clinical trial of CBT/GET seems difficult without an objective marker of disability, ill health, or disease activity. That is the excuse by CBT/GET proponents. MAGENTA now includes a measurement of activity levels which could be interesting. Measure like the six minute...

He would never admit to disliking patients because it doesn't fit the image he's trying to cultivate. The solution is to say other people dislike these patients.

Some thoughts on this http://www.bristol.ac.uk/ccah/research/childdevelopmentdisability/chronic-fatigue/magenta-trial/ Ineffective treatments appear effective mainly due to reporting biases and regression to the mean. This study fails to control both of these factors. The design of the GET...

What the PACE CBT therapist manual says about setbacks https://www.qmul.ac.uk/wolfson/media/wolfson/current-projects/3.cbt-therapist-manual.pdf 1. No acknowledgement that increased activity is probably the most common trigger for aggravation of symptoms. 2. The insistence that setbacks are not...

CBT/GET proponents seem to view "setbacks" as normal and expected event during therapy. The impression is that adverse reactions are normalized.

That's when patients are informed that their belief to have been harmed is incorrect. It is assumed that patients are not sick, and that exercise cannot do real harm, so whatever the patient is reporting cannot be correct, and must be a hysterical misinterpretation of ordinary postexercise...

Right. That is the most likely explanation.

One day I hope to understand the mystery of what really happens when someone claims they've been cured thanks to LP. Are they full blown delusional thanks to LP? Were they were full blown delusional before, and LP is akin to fighting fire with fire? Are they just letting themselves go to...

That said it is very disappointing that Prof. Bishop doesn't seem to have recognized LP as exploitative pseudoscience. Kids being instructed by a guru figure to stand in "magical circles" and telling their illness to stop, at the cost of several hundred pounds. Or perhaps she really has bought...