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'Physical' just means causal. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, and many others before and after, we know nothing of the physical world other than patterns of causation. And as far as we know physical covers all causes in that all the causes involved in thoughts seem to be mediated by the same...

It seems to me likely that the brain can orchestrate both a desire to stop having to think and aching in the muscles through efferent neural signals modulating afferent sensory signals. Maybe it is a bit like the opposite of the effect that allows soldiers who lose a limb to carry on home...

While it seems a good idea to study OI and potential treatments my impression is that this study is badly planned in all sorts of ways. Blinding is likely to be a problem for comparing IV saline with salty sweet rehydration fluid by mouth. I don't understand why they think either of these will...

As I read it 5693 is the number of SNPs found to have a twofold difference between groups, not the number tested. Without any real denominators in these figures I cannot make anything of their significance.

Not that I know of. The muscle MR spectroscopy group from UCL are all disbanded and retired now. Maybe this sort of thing but I know very little about them. I guess one would want to do something like the 2 day CPET - to look at muscle biochemistry in vivo alongside the cardiorespiratory...

Looking at this document two things send out for me. Firstly it is written like an advertising brochure rather than an evidence-based guidance document. Secondly, it is completely opaque is to what type of CBT is being suggested for 'MUS' and for what purpose. The most ambiguous sentence is...

Anything that alters our behaviour has to be a real physical shortcoming. All mental events are physically mediated as far as I am concerned. I know what you mean but I think it is a false way of categorising - the same mistake that the BPS people make, whilst denying that they do. The key...

Roughly yes. But I think it may be too simple to talk of energy as in ATP availability. During infection the body wastes vast amounts of energy raising the body temperature. The retiring to bed response ('illness behaviour') may be designed to prevent all sorts of situations that might distract...

A simple thing to do is to stimulate the muscle directly with electricity, which will overcome neural inhibitory signals. It is that sort of experiment that led people to think the problem is central some time back. The experiments may not have been done well though. The other thing is to look...

I think the suggestion was that this was centrally mediated, which it might be. There might be overactivity of neural inhibition mechanisms of the sort that occur with pain and which we can be completely unaware of.

I think it is more likely that regulatory control of voluntary muscle use is screwed up. If you twist your knee you cannot voluntarily contract muscles because the nervous system prevents it in advance. So the problem is not about energy production. It might be that energy production is also...

The British Journal of General Practice is not strictly speaking a research journal. It is a professional journal - it represents the interests of a particular profession - that of general practice. Which may mean that correcting demonstrable errors could be a sacking offence, if the...

I think we need to distinguish POTS from POT, and also from 'dysautonomia'. POT is a particular clinical finding of increased heart rate on being upright. It isn't necessarily abnormal because some healthy people show that. It can be demonstrated with a tilt table. POTS is a syndrome of...

I think I need to see actual data to be able to make anything of this. Fisher seems to be studying cultured lymphoblasts. I am puzzled as to why these should show any stable mitochondrial abnormality away from plasma factors. ME/C~FS is not congenital so any abnormal activity would need to...

I think not. As far as I can see the paper provides no evidence for anything much.

I fear that if CBT 'goes down' that LP will go with it.

@Jaybee00 Has Dr Fisher published anything or are these preliminary findings reported at a conference?

There seems to be considerable uncertainty about this. All the quotes of up to 10% I can find seem to make a diagnosis by inference from symptoms that could be other things. The only paper I found with prevalence of confirmed endometriosis suggested about 1.5%.

The author seems to be bothered by the thing I was bothered by - why the two electrodes are so close together. I don't understand the need for a nano needle to measure something you might better measure at the macro (or micro) level. I don't quite see the point of explaining impedance in an...

Actually that comment seems to be incoherent. I have no idea what the person thinks they are meaning.