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This is pure plagiarism. I am sure it was in a Monty Python sketch in 1977 with John Cleese as Monica Streeb-Grebeling.

I agree, deeply disappointing. By all means listen to what Dr B has to say but one could have hoped for a more enlightening comment.

I had a peep. It is too dreadful to even register for this month's free peepie. I was quite interested by Thought for Today today on BBC Radio 4 Today. A regular lady priest was agonising over the issue of whistleblowers in the context of the Chinese doctor who reported the coronavirus and got...

I am tempted to make a Wonko-style nonsensical observation here - but only to provide a sort of 'Amen chorus' to an eternal truth. I have visions of dung beetles pushing balls of pseudoscientific dung up a sand dune to feed their larvae dressed in blue cardigans and other assorted 'chattering...

Which makes me wonder why as a rheumatologist seeing hundreds of new patients a year for thirty years I can recall seeing no more than a dozen people who I now realise had ME/CFS. Maybe ME/CFS is not referred specifically to rheumatologists but at least I should have seen more people with CFS...

Most micro-organisms do not survive more than a few minutes at 80 Celsius (176F). As I understand it viruses of this sort tend not to like being completely dried out and away from host environment for very long anyway. 100 Celsius kills almost anything (212F) except strange spore forming...

I don't really understand your scepticism @large donner. This is a virus that produces pneumonia bad enough to require hospital care in maybe one person in seven affected. It may kill as many as one in fifty and maybe more because the death figures ahave to be compared with the diagnosis figures...

Worth reading the Kekule blog mentioned by Leila. Mortality from regular flu seems to be about 0.1%. For the new coronavirus the figure looks to be about 2% but if this is underestimated because of lag in diagnosis to death it might be above 10%. Strangely the MRC have put out an estimate of 18%...

That blog looks like an excellent and unbiased assessment. The only thing I would quibble with is the idea that wearing a mask might raise ungrounded fears. I see a much bigger problem with people forgetting to be careful. Thus, yesterday evening I arrived at Heathrow and had to queue for nearly...

But Charles goes on to point out that things are getting more serious quite quickly. As I see it if everyone thinks that the risk is nearly zero then the virus is pretty well guaranteed to spread unnecessarily. I would personally advise everyone to take the risk seriously. I was amused to see...

I am tempted to rephrase the old (unjustified as it was ) adage: Those who can understand science, do science. Those who can't become professors of the public understanding of science.

I have not looked in detail but it seem as if they previously found a (very slight) increase in antibody levels to receptors in ME/CFS patients but now they find that these antibodies do nothing to the receptors, whereas ordinary people's antibodies do do something. That seems pretty confusing.

If I remember correctly glycolysis means the oxygen-independent (anaerobic) breakdown of sugars to pyruvate. So it is not actually the 'burning' of sugar of aerobic respiration. I am not sure I can comment more usefully on the lactate results. Snow Leopard tends to be good on this.

Three points that we have discussed before may be worth mentioning. Firstly, although I do not have the sources I am sure that in looking at this I found that it is recognised that some normal people show >30 bpm increase on standing and that this is not in itself diagnostic of 'POTS'...

If someone has said 'for most people complete recovery is unusual' then it would be good to improve the English usage. Recovery is not usual or unusual for a person - it is unusual with a population.

Well, they will find a report, as part of the documentation of the next ME NICE guidelines, from this expert witness making it absolutely clear that the weight of evidence for CBT and GET is that they do not work. I won't mind having to justify that in a court of law under cross examination. I...

I agree that a GP is likely to be better than a psychotherapist, but only to the extent that rather than 'managing ME/CFS' they may be honest enough to realise they have no clue what to do. I cannot see the basis for saying that people should be managed by GPs. They should be managed by...

I am not sure I would say that. I think if I was someone who had recently developed ME/CFS I would find it confusing. The first section seems to blur two quite different points that ought to be separate. One is that it is important to have a clear idea what is likely to be wrong (making a...

I suppose you might want to deliver CBT at a bit of a distance if there is bowel trouble about. Maybe that's why they have invented this. The Monty Python script writers would have died for this stuff.

Windgassen seems an unfortunate name for anyone who wants to be taken seriously. Especially if they are in the business of bowel trouble. And they specialise in hot air.