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I am not sure that I have any confidence that a 'care and support plan' is of any use other than as a tool for healthcare professionals to manipulate the situation. I never gave patients a care and support plan, I just explained what I thought might help based on reliable evidence. Plans change...

I actually wonder whether you might not get more useful information @Ellen by just asking your questions openly to the forum so that people can give their views on them as and when they like without any pressure. I think you are likely to get a much more balanced view that way and it would be...

She would be sixty plus I think, and conceivable even 65.

Dear Ellen, It is good to see people wanting to take an interest in ME/CFS. Finding out more about school problems sounds like a useful thing to do. Could I ask, however, for you to put in some ordinary speak words what specific things you think might come out of it? Enhancing educational...

I think it is reasonable to say that there are no resources to implement care and support plans. If that means regular home visits over the duration of the illness it is way outside what any budget would cover. That sort of service, as for domiciliary care for anything else, has largely...

It is worth querying but I can assure you that as someone who once had a specific interest in animal models I think the ME charity policy is exactly right. There are not experiments that involve direct harm to animals as disease modelling exercises worth doing in ME/CFS and I doubt there ever...

Well, having been on the steering committee of a research group funded by such a charity that had to use reagents derived from laboratory animals I can say that things are not so unequivocal. You cannot do any immunology without doing that. And there wouldn't even be any immunology if there...

I think the situation is more nuanced. All immunology, from which we have to build theories of disease, has involved animal experimentation to establish how the immune system normally works and responds to stimuli. ME/CFS charities are happy to fund research that makes use of that knowledge...

Sabrina Duggan appears to be a careers advisor with a heavy emphasis on selling yourself.

Well that about sums it up I suppose. Get you ready for selling ear seeds on Dragon's Den I guess.

Yes, I am afraid that the 'politically vital' is a bit of a foot-put-in-it.

I have emailed a Goldsmith address but have no idea if I will get a response.

A formal complaint to Goldsmith's would be in order but it may be a tedious process trying to do so.

Indeed, my step counter, which I use every day, is tediously precise. It keeps telling me that the walk I hoped was 10,000 steps was in fact 8,869 steps. And really I knew it was.

The bits quoted seem pretty half baked. The brain stem might well be relevant but all the stuff about not connecting to brain and virus reactivation and blood brain barrier and mitochondria and... seems just a minestrone of all the usual.

Yes, well we have known that since the 1970s, when Brewerton sneakily made the first report of HLA-B27 being associated with Ank Spond. (he had seen some other people's data it seems). In the paragraph they say "This high failure rate is mainly due to a lack of efficacy8 and reflects our poor...

I wouldn't bother crying. I don't think these figures are what we call statistically significant at all. They are just differences between before and after. Not between groups.

It is a pity that their opening sentence is a reference to a putative increase in autoimmune disease when the conditions they are reporting on are not autoimmune diseases. You have to be fairly muddled to make a mistake like that.

Hmm. It. might indicate that in certain areas, like this one, people are constantly drawing inappropriate conclusions from in vitro studies that get fashionable for a while and then get replaced by another fashion. I have not read the full article but the abstract reads like an advert for these...

Dose ranging studies are very standard in the pharmaceutical area. At some stage they are required, to optimise dose. I am not sure what legal requirements are but as an ethics committee member my memory is that as long as patients/subjects are given reasonably sufficient information to make an...