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Is getting death threats is a quick way to elevate your status in UK academia?

Yes it's horrible that in the media there are these nonchalant conversations about whether patients are imagining it, making themselves ill with their beliefs, able to recover but choosing not to and so on. It's not normal. One shouldn't propose such ideas without some kind of evidence.

On most days I'm able to do a 20 minute walk and have done so for the last year or two. This has no noticable positive effect on the illness. Doing more than what I can tolerate quickly leads to a worsening. It does seem to lower heart rate somewhat and maintain some fitness that would otherwise...

Exercise is a dead end because there's no reason to think the disease has much to to with low fitness. That's just an idea popularized by the early CBT/GET papers which sought to rationalize the treatment.

Someone seems to be lying. She worked with Wessely at the time. I wonder someone instigated her to deal with criticism from patients by making up a death threat story, or she received a call from someone pretending to be a reporter.

My focal epilepsy can create sensations that are never felt otherwise and do not obey the usual rules of what I'm normally supposed to be able to perceive. It is very much like a dream in that aspect.

A voyeurism that is excited by psychosomatic cases and doesn't really want to know whether they actually are psychosomatic cases or not.

In Nicaragua, it is apparently normal to believe in demons as cause of illness. In other places it's normal to believe in psychosomatic causes of illlness, but just because something is a commonly accepted belief doesn't mean it's any more valid scientifically.

I was very skeptical about such claims but since these cases apparently exist only in Sweden and are not isolated events local factors must play a part in the development of this illness.

He's testing the waters, seeing how much psychologization he can get away with. What he says about support groups is close to claiming mass hysteria, but expressed so that he can always deny this interpretation should he be attacked for it.

I recognize a kind of reaction to physical exertion that has a short delay, perhaps 20-40 minutes. This is not PEM but I think a combination of muscle fatigueability and the cumulative effects of orthostatic intolerance. Orthostatic intolerance doesn't necessarily begin immediately (unless it's...

It makes the BPS approach look like an emotionally-based belief system in search for confirmation.

The ME/CFS community tends to be too quick to assume that someone didn't have ME/CFS because some other medical problem was found. There is no reason to believe that someone cannot have ME/CFS and other health problems. It actually seems to be the norm. The concept of CFS as exclusionary...

The rs identification codes refer to variants only. A variant is something that only a minority of people have.

Did she really say no research necessary? That would be unbelievably irresponsible.

One could unironically argue that the best healthcare system for ME is in countries that neglect treatment but do recognize ME and have a research program for it. I'm not sure that such countries exist.

Rumor is that Garner will receive funding for a clinical trial of GET for long covid. What a disaster.

Some were just uncaring but most were probably trying to balance the economic harm of lockdowns versus the risk of the illness and their calculations didn't consider the possibility of postinfectious syndromes in the younger population. In the first months, the narrative was that of an illness...

In my opinion, a lot. ME/CFS and other illnesses would have been researched more without the MUS belief system (which explicitly says that no disease is present). Even if no progress had been made in understanding the biology well enough to do anything, the risk of long covid would have been...

This is just brilliant. The rest of the article is very good too. It goes to the heart of the problem of what went wrong with ME/CFS and so many other illnesses: MUS and the associated belief system.