Search results

This the idea De Masio has been plugging for the last twenty years. It does not make sense to me. Why should a pounding heart make us feel fear? In fact a pounding heart can also be associated with rapture or just running for a bus that you just about catch. So a pounding heart cannot be the...

Immunological problems in childhood or adolescence that peter out in adulthood are reasonably common. Juvenile inflammatory arthritis often peters out, whereas adult rheumatoid tends not to. Childhood allergies and asthma may peter out whereas adult asthma probably less often does...

Yes, on re-reading it becomes clearer what the sentences mean. And I guess that reading the full paper would help. However, as it stands the abstract is pretty opaque and I am still not convinced that the way the data are presented is always legitimate.

An alternative possibility is that ME is a pattern of breakdown of signalling in a complex control system (maybe neurological or immunological or both). That reversibility of that pattern may depend on the state of maturation or development of the system. Early on there may be ways to re-route...

It adds a whole new meaning to 'phone a friend'. If the answer to a crossword puzzle clue is not immediately obvious, souls in one's head pause and wait until other souls (that have read the clue) chirp up with 'baker's dozen' or 'Huckleberry Finn'. If you think about it, there have to be lots...

On initial reading the abstract seems to include a contradiction. It says that 50% reported recovery. But then it says 68% were recovered at 10 years. Moreover, although it says that the mean duration was 5 years (1-15) for those reporting recovery in the results in the conclusion it says mean...

I wonder why Larun felt threatened by a critical article about a study that she wasn’t involved with. This is indeed interesting. It makes it look as if she had a very vested interest in the conclusion of her review. It fits, perhaps, with the frontispiece of her PhD where she says how...

Not particularly. They probably advertise a tertiary referral centre so all the diagnosis gets made elsewhere and if everyone in the London area ends up at the Maudsley there will be quite a few with FND.

Yes, but they all think differently the same way at any one time.

Then of course there's 'great minds think alike' especially if they are in the same head.

I think this is actually quite unlikely. Quite a lot of people with MS may get ignored because signs are subtle or absent but then they are likely to be categorised as hypochondriac or anxious, not as FND. FND refers to the specific situation where the patient claims to be paralysed but physical...

@boolybooly. I started looking into the mind-body business about fifteen years ago and came to the conclusion that the popular narrative is backwards. The 'soul-body' duality that gets stick these days comes from the early scientific arguments of Descartes, not from religion. Descartes reasoned...

Channelopathies are not part of the motor functional neurological disorder category, although they may well get misdiagnosed as that if the clinical assessment is not thorough.

I think the weakness of the study is that it is supposed to tease out demographics but is based on the referrals to a psychiatric clinic. So there is no chance that it will tell us anything useful about demographics of the illness, as opposed to demographics of attendees. Using psychiatric...

I suspect there are two issues here though. One is that people are bigots, and always have been and always will be. Injustice will always be with us. That seems to be the lesson of history. However, specific injustices do get addressed along the way. The core problem with this whole episode is...

I suspect it is intended to protect HRA from any accusation of rocking any boats. It seems to include bits from advisers with different agendas, or maybe as you imply, to pacify everyone. Having been initiated by Parliament it was inevitable that the eminent friends of PACE would get called in...

I have not said you are a bad person, Amy. I just think you have been carried along by the tsunami of phoney science that passes for real science these days. No there isn't Amy. I trained under Spector and Willoughby in inflammation research in the 1980s at Bart's (the hub of European...

The girls seem to have got into gear. No stopping them now I am afraid.

Bexercise-psychs? (Typified by pedalling backwards.)

Especially now we are trying to save the planet. All shopping bags are supposed to be re-usable.