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I am not dismissing a priori but I am pointing out reasons why we should be very sceptical. This is not a new generation of physicians. The 'consensus statement' is not a formally published academic statement from the profession. It is a statement from a 'think-tank' meeting of surgeons...

I don't really understand this. CCI is a situation where bones are moving abnormally in relation to each other - right? Bones show better on plain old fashioned x-rays than on MRI - much better resolution. Flexion x-rays of the neck for CCI have been around since I was a student at least. You do...

Thanks for pointing out the citation. Henderson again. I find this underwhelming. There is pretty much nothing in it I have not been aware of for most of my career. I routinely did flexion imaging in the 1970s. He admits that he has no data other than on osteogenesis imperfects and Down's...

No, I think not. Both doctors and patients get the syndrome of ME right before they ever heard of it. There were people with ME in 1979 (and neither they nor I knew it was called ME).

No it's the Crawley paper that has been a year, not the Segal paper - that has been about a week.

Thanks @Stewart (sorry not Stuart), It is useful to get your impression on the history. The clinical picture of CCI has been around for 100 years. Every medical student is taught it. So it is interesting that neurosurgeons have been proposing a 'new syndrome' in the last 7-8 years. It is...

I didn't look very hard but wondered if it was just a Monsanto press release under a cover name.

One further thing that has not been mentioned is that the complications of upper cervical surgery may develop over many decades. Once the mechanics of the spine have been altered secondary changes tend to occur over many years. Bony overgrowth commonly occurs, and that may cause nerve damage...

@Stuart, I think there is a problem with the concept of 'cervical medullary syndrome' as used by the neurosurgeon Peterson. I don't think most neurologists would recognise his 'syndrome' as a good guide to the clinical picture of CCI. Maybe the term is more widely used, but if it is I don't...

No, you have hit the nail on the head. Physicians and surgeons have been dealing with tens of thousands of cases of CCI, of known cause, over many decades. They do not have symptoms of ME. Moreover, for any disease process we always see milder and more severe cases. If ME was associated with...

@debored13, I will put some further comments on the other thread started by Michiel to separate this from reference to any individual PWME.

I think you are right to call these recovery stories both for the reasons you give and because in both everyday and medical usage we use these terms in all sorts of slightly different ways in different contexts. In the context 'recovery story' recovery need not imply permanent and complete...

Yes, but like anchovy sauce, moderation in all things is best.

Two thoughts. One is, as I put in the post, this may well not be a placebo effect but an effect on CNS function. When I was given my hearing aids my sudden ability to hear birds I had not heard for years was not a placebo effect. The second is that my gut feeling is that there may well be a...

The images here are straightforward. They show narrowing of the spinal canal in all cases. A plain x-ray would have been just as good to show that because the narrowing is due to bone. In addition the first two show distortion of the cord that looks significant. The third does not. Appearances...

I was saying that my own paper was crap. This is the paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7332373 The idea of the paper was to show that people with benign joint hypermobility, defined as hyper mobility in the absence of features in internal organs, had an increased prevalence of mitral...

So why did Rodney get me to do a Beighton score on every patient when I arrived fresh as a junior registrar? I don't mean to be rude but I was actually significantly involved in the whole business of upgrading 'BHS' into 'hEDS' in the very early days. I was there in the clinic with Rodney using...

Pardon me for saying but I do know about Beighton, which was used for clinical diagnosis routinely in the clinic I did with Rodney Grahame in the 1970s. I also know about Brighton, which is just as arbitrary. I published one of the first clinical research papers on this stuff with Grahame in the...

I don't see any way of testing it with imaging because current imaging techniques do not show up complex neurocomputational patterns.

As always, my chief concern with all these issues is for the safety of children. It looks as if a parent has already taken a child for a standing MRI to be assessed for CCI. This I find very distressing. Even if I am wrong that the whole CCI/ME thing is a scam at least it looks like highly...