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The dark psychosomatic history of cancer part II In Part I, we saw how psychoanalytically oriented researchers speculated about an ‘Amazon complex’ and the excremental meaning of cancer. These papers were so absurd that, luckily, they had little influence. That cannot be said of the recurrent...

Regarding this statement. I had a look at a recent review, such as this Cochrane review from 2017, which seems to confirm it. It states: "there was no evidence that psychological treatments had an effect on total mortality, the risk of revascularisation procedures, or on the rate of non-fatal...

Thought this was an interesting commentary, worth reading. Much of the evidence for psychosomatic theories, for example about stress causing diseases such as heart disease or cancer, come from observational studies. The authors highlight two problems in such studies: Often the risk factor...

Abstract Adverse psychosocial exposure or "misery" is associated with physical disease. This association may not be causal. Rather it may reflect issues of reverse causation, reporting bias, and confounding by aspects of the material environment typically associated with misery. A non-causal...

Reading about heart disease which is interesting because trials of psychosocial interventions often include lots objective outcomes. These do not seem to support psychosomatic theories that factors such as stress or depression predispose people to heart disease or recurrence of infarcation...

Here are the documents Francis received and asked me to upload here on S4ME (EDIT: haven't looked at these myself)

Not sure what to make of this literature now. Seems inconsistent, mostly dependent on how "persistent symptoms" is defined. The high background rate that some studies find, suggest to me that they haven't defined it stringently enough. Would be interested to see a study that tested for ME/CFS...

There is also a new prospective study by the Aucott group that reported a larger difference. The authors report: "13•7% with a history of prior LD met criteria for PTLD compared to 4•1% of those without. Participants with prior LD were approximately 5•28 times as likely to meet PTLD criteria...

The results of this study have been published here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(21)00119-8/fulltext The prevalence of what the authors defined as persistent symptoms, was more prevalent in those who had acute lyme disease than in the controls group, although...

I would also give them a short and polite message about how you hope that they continue studying ME/CFS, that it is under researched, that it means a lot to patients etc. EMEC has made an overview of potential funding sources and networks that might be handy in this case...

Good questions. I think researchers usually calculate test-retest reliability and internal consistency (Cronbach alpha). Then, they look how strong the correlation is with other questionnaires that have been used a lot and should measure the same or a similar thing. Sometimes they do a...

They compared fatigue scores in the long covid group with those recorded for other disease groups (lower score = more fatigue):

This seems to be the fatigue scale they used. Hadn't heard of it, is apparently used in cancer research. Source: https://hign.org/sites/default/files/2020-06/Try_This_General_Assessment_30.pdf This is interesting and a good idea in my view: After data collection, a patient partner (KF)...

We were a bit surprised that there was so much material for an illness as cancer. For many of the diseases that we looked into, psychosomatic theories were popular until the 1950s but then started to decline. With cancer, it almost seems like the other way around. A psychosomatic approach to...

Thanks for posting Andy. Arimont has been a supporter of ME/CFS patients for a while now at the European level. His efforts are much appreciated.

Interesting response from Hans Knoop to questions from ME/CFS patient representatives. The followings summary was published on the website of Lou Corsius: 5. It is known that measuring only subjective outcome parameters in such an open trial has a high risk for bias. Therefore, objective...

This also looks interesting:

One caveat: In Belgium and the Netherlands, the Health Council has written a report where they mention that GET should not be given to ME/CFS, but that is not the same as an official guideline. In the Netherlands, for example, there is an official guideline on the management of ME/CFS created...

Here's the pdf document that @FMMM1 asked me to upload

I don't understand the point of writing a blog post about this without naming the individual (because people will probably start speculating who it might be). Perhaps I'm missing something but it seems like it's one or the other: either you don't mention it publicly and try to fix things...