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On the question 'is ME/CFS more severe in men, or in women, or can we not say?' Figure 5 I'm wondering about the reports about severity coming out of the paper. I understand that several things are being reported here, differences in: overall severity (mild versus the more severe...

More on the morning cortisol test: They say that the samples were collected at least ten minutes after rinsing with water, which is an odd thing to report, because I don't think it would occur to most people to rinse their mouth first thing in the morning. The instructions I found for the...

I'm not sure what to make of the low morning cortisol. It's a small highly selected sample, and if you wanted to prove that your treatment worked, you would probably choose people with abnormal objective results, so that there was room for improvement. There were no healthy controls, probably...

That's a pretty powerful placebo inducing treatment, boosted by the observation of the Horner effect: 'It's working!'. Measurement of Cognitive Function Doesn't appear to have been any adjustment for the learning effect (ie knowing what you have to do and some practice makes your scores...

Selection bias - participants were inclined to believe that the treatment would be useful. Because the two authors have a vested interest in showing the treatment that they sell to be useful, the sort of loose approach to selection could lead to all sorts of biases. For example, maybe people...

Here's the supposed mechanism (paragraphs added): I think they meant miosis (constriction of the pupil) rather than meiosis.

It will be interesting to see if Garner leaps to write a dismissal of this treatment (as he did for the microclot filtering treatment). While this treatment gives every appearance of deserving to be dismissed, the problems with the trial design are the same as for the particular treatments that...

Ethics committees assess research against national guidelines. They do actually check the guidelines at times. In my country, there are processes such as ethics committees reporting which standards research applicants are failing on, and when approved research runs into problems. I know...

Upstream, @Sasha asked about whether there are guidelines for research ethics committees. There are. I think most countries have national health research guidelines. They present a big opportunity to move general practice in the right direction. We should be finding the guidelines for our...

Actually, reading the article again, I think it is not clear. It doesn't define Long Covid, or recognise that formal definitions include everything but the kitchen sink. As in, they allow any persistent symptom and so cover overt tissue damage, damage caused by ventilation, ME/CFS compliant...

I am staggered that they found seventeen studies on this to include in the systematic review. It seems such a niche and random topic and yet there's almost an industry in churning out studies of virtual reality for fibromyalgia alone. I guess virtual reality is the next step in supposedly...

That resource has the AfME logo on it. @Dolphin, where did you find it? Was it via an AfME webpage? 'These systems ... operate at a deep level inside us'. It's embarrassing. But is this the source of the ME/CFS Care Plan that AfME recently agreed was a problem? The one that Trish wrote a...

Neither would I. It's just that progress on some of the projects in his lab has seemed to be very slow, with a lot of funds going to building a biobank of samples. It would be good to hear from people who actually know - what is the state of Lipkin's ME/CFS work now?

A good article at the right time can make a difference. It's a good article, and I guess we'll see if it is the right time to be calling on the NIH to 'seize this moment to lead'. The people at the NIH might possibly be thinking about other things right now. But, when I see this coming from...

Always interesting to see who is writing these sorts of review articles. Krista Clarke Centre for Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK Dr Krista Clarke obtained her first degree in Biomedical Science (Hons) from the University of Birmingham...

I think, having communicated with some, and to the extent that they think about us at all, they think that at least a large proportion of us are hypochondriacs and psychosomatics who are truly helped by GET and CBT. They may think that a minority of us have a physical disease, but they truly...

Message from the moderators: This thread is for discussing the implications of the policies of the new US government as they relate to ME/CFS and related conditions. Therefore the impact of policies to restrict research grants or to not collect data on certain topics can be discussed here...

Yes, a great article Dave. Thanks to you and The Sick Times for the mention of the petition and the link.

'significant percentage of patients were considered responders'. The question is responders to what? - the drug or hope?