Search results

But you had said muscle (and mental) fatigue! That seems pretty nonspecific. Are there other sorts of fatigue? - I am not sure.

Yes but I am not suggesting that ME is having the flu. I am simply saying that the sort of signalling that occurs, probably with a different kinetic pattern, with flu, might explain PEM or feeling exhausted immediately after exertion, in a way that a simple failure to generate ATP would not. If...

This is a key point. If this was all hypothalamic/neural then I don't know of any superimposed cycles of sensitivity of the signalling system that would give the inconsistency - not that that means there aren't any. One thing about immune regulatory signals is that they have set time frames...

I actually think this may be consistent. It is purely anecdotal but if I am brewing on infection I may find that when I go to bed I am sore and stiff specifically in the muscles I used that day - maybe to cut a hedge or something. The cytokines that go around with febrile episodes seem to be...

yes I think so

Is that more vague? It seems to me more specific - because it pins the fatigue down to a central mechanism rather than being unspecified (central or peripheral).

The symptom pattern sounds to me much more like what happens when developing a viral infection like flu. You find you cannot do a normal task, feel worse after and then worse still later and cannot begin to try again. You end up lying in bed not wanting to see or hear anything. And none of that...

So the problem is that a defect in ATP generation does not explain the triple problem. It might explain the first but not the others. That means we need another explanation as well and one always likes to minimise the number of explanations needed.

I actually think all this stuff is a storm in a teacup. The real problem with science is something quite different. Why are these studies so hard to reproduce? Because they were tests of not very clever ideas that turned out to be wrong. The real problem with science is that the vast majority...

Interesting video. For me it breaks into three parts. In the first White talks about mental and physical and gets the whole thing back to front. Psychiatric disease is not disease caused by 'psychological factors', it is disease that affects thoughts. And we have every reason t think it is...

I think this stuff may simply indicate that self-reported evidence of conditions is very unreliable. The prevalence of endometriosis according to epidemiological data is about 1.5%, not 16%. Another question is how these people were recruited. US cohorts very often seem to be based on clinic...

Thanks @Clementine No patient organisation should be saying things like that. The fact that an ethical committee approved something means nothing other than it may not be bad (if they had not approved it probably is bad). It might still be bad - patients are entitled to make up their own minds...

No, I wasn't implying it was. I was implying that categories like 'biological' don't necessarily help people understand what the distinctions are. I doubt that is the case, actually. For most psychiatric illness 'rehabilitation techniques' are a waste of time I suspect. I think most...

I think it is important to accept that Simon Wessely has a point in cautioning overoptimism about new findings. Wessely did some competent biological research early on - he is not ignorant of immunology, genetics and such things. He found nothing and admitted it. And nothing since has really...

Now might be a bad time to do that, for technical reasons. I am normally happy for whatever I post to be copied.

It is peculiar that this has been published in a paediatric neurology journal! I find it hard to believe that if 30% of women with ME have endometriosis this has not been documented before.

Sorry to hear that the organisation has taken an ill informed view. But it sounds as if at least the problem is out in the open. And I suspect the organisation will shrivel away if this is the road it wants to take. Maybe something better can rise up in its place. I think the Vink and...

Excellent detail here. I had not realised that both Cochrane reviews were written by Jonathan Price who is a junior member of Michael Sharpe's department.

Think there is generally an assumption that if a treatment is known to be effective in adults it is reasonable to use it on adolescents. Most treatments have no specific trials in young people. Which is why the Lightning Process trial was so peculiar. I guess that the adolescent services are...

I think this must just be a reference to there having been a trial. I can imagine that there would be a certain amount of resistance at GOS/UCL to starting up Lightning Process.