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The "magic label" was the hype and hope for Rituximab. It may have been the first time ever some patiens felt that effort was made to help and that they weren't ignored or belittled. This context cannot really be replicated. CBT/GET probably doesn't work well as placebo because generally...

The advice to elevate the head end of the bed by 10 degrees is given for POTS. I tried this several times but it seems to make my sleep worse. I suspect it causes an increase in heart rate which reduces sleep quality. Elevating the legs often leads to improvement within seconds (may take a...

They're trying to establish the view that it is morally good to treat ME/CFS as non-disease. They're keen on proactive social engineering. So that disability claims can continue to be rejected.

After you've excluded heart conditions make sure to also exclude POTS.

There were at least 3 researchers that seem to be new to ME/CFS.

Can't tell if they are crazy or just dishonest or very stupid. The reason patients see themselves as patients is because they are sick. They cannot function normally.

A useful I think way to think about ME/CFS in the context of subgroups is that we cannot reject the idea that it's mostly a single disease (after allowing for some inevitable misdiagnoses). We also cannot reject the idea that it's many different diseases. It is useful to draw a boundary...

A friend's friend has multiple sclerosis and is bed bound and slowly dying from it. There are also people that have multiple sclerosis and don't look sick and can function fairly well in daily life. Same illness, looks totally different from the outside. I understand that MS can also produce a...

I could relate to her when she crashed hard after going out, although I don't crash in the same way as she did in that scene. Then again I'm not as ill as she was at the time and it's difficult to predict how things would be if I was.

A muddle is the reality. There may be a human tendency to respond to uncertainty with dogmatism but this is of no help when wanting to find out the truth. It is easy to define some hypothetical true ME as whatever remains unexplained, or by whatever some authority figure says (but why this...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02698479

Furedi has written on CFS, in an article about medicalization. I think this tells me he is writing about things he knows nothing about. Unfortunately sci hub is not working at the moment so I can't read it.

The illness model they propose tells us something about them. They did not gradually develop this model while being guided by evidence. They pulled it out of thin air, asserting that it was the truth. This model then gave them the authority to pressure patients, for example in the context of...

Please do.

The real problem is that medicine is generally bad at handling patients with unexplained illness. They think unexplained means somatizing, and that their job is to manage the somatizing patient by being nice or deceptive, but they have not shown that somatization is a real thing or is occurring...

It is insulting to suggest that patients cannot tell the difference between deconditioning and chronic illness, or that they erroneously think to be ill, and other similar things. It is also flawed logic, as it's ultimately based on the idea that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

This may be off topic but transient responses to some drug or supplement seem to be typically interpreted as placebo effect. It's important to realize that this interpretation is not based on actually observing a "placebo effect" but merely a transient self reported response. It seems plausible...

Mental disorder seems to often be informally defined as any behaviour or opinions that are sufficiently distant from what is considered normal. This means that in one culture, a behaviour could be mental illness while in another it could be normal.

What an amateur. She should have promised big healthcare savings, gotten funding for a large unblinded subjective RCT, switch outcomes and then publish in The Lancet.