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From an institute of sports medicine. So now MS is a sporting injury?

In other words the Telegraph has fallen for the con by the professionals just like every one else. The Guardian is the same.

Is it a reliable test? Breakspear don't have a reputation for being scientifically reliable.

But only if we have reason to think it relates to causation. We tend to assume it must do but it need not. 98% of people with fibromyalgia may have high levels of one or other painkiller in the blood but it wouldn't be a useful biomarker. In reality, what people will take seriously as a...

That isn't the point, @DMissa. The point is that it is a common fallacy to think that medicine is looking for very high levels of correlation. If you are able to establish such high levels it means that you already have the confidence you need for making an accurate diagnosis. If the test does...

I don't actually think we want biomarkers for anything. We want tests that reliably identify some physiological change that is likely to be related to what causes the symptoms. Tests that agree with symptoms 98% are pretty useless because it means the symptoms are already good enough to...

I have to admit that I did nearly water my cousin's plastic orchid once when renting her apartment in the Alps.

The subtle irony of my post was perhaps lost?

I can see the headline now: People with fibromyalgia can't tell plastic from real flowers. Or so it is claimed.

I note that they judged cell abnormality on the basis of circulating free DNA. A key feature of SSc is that cells die - especially the endothelial cells of blood vessels - which is why the nail capillaries are abnormal. So they are measuring vascular cell damage probably. There is no indication...

I think this paper is problematic but maybe it has some value for systemic sclerosis SSc. People with SSc are often severely fatigued, or described being exhausted or unable to carry out daily activities even at an early stage when signs are few. This study looks at patients with limited...

Yes, the situation for the last fifty years has been that MS has been seen as a pathological brain disorder but large numbers of patients with MS get misdiagnosed as having a 'functional' illness rather than MS. I think that situation was probably the same since the late nineteenth century.

The editor may well be a journalist who happens to be sympathetic to the PWME cause. The editorial officers do not appear to be medics.

A dead parrot comes to mind.

I do not see it as ethical to wait for studies we have no reason to think will be much better than the ones so far when the story is still being put in to journal reviews as if it should be taken seriously and the treatment sharks have cover. I am afraid that the fact that people who do science...

That would be true if there was reasonably good evidence they are really there in greater amounts in patients. This review is saying that so far there isn't enough evidence that this is a real phenomenon to even spend money on investigating. Basically the people who have claimed these clots are...

It may do but it may also quite appropriately point out that the microclot idea is all in the mind of some 'scientists'.

This looks very solid and timely to me. The fact that Paul Garner's name is on it is irrelevant as far as I am concerned. The author list also includes Greg Towers who is nobody's fool and I think contributed to the detailed debunking of XMRV. We needed the establishment community to come out...

No, I do not think biopsy is going to help us.

I think there was enough inflammation to significantly alterT cell populations in muscle it ought to have been picked upon some cases by now. In polymyalgia we thought there was nothing much to find in muscles, just a raised ESR, but when MRI became available it showed up like a light bulb...