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Anything blocking the external auditory meatus (earhole) is expected to increase tinnitus simply because it starves the acoustic neurons of sound and tinnitus is largely due to acoustic neurons turning up their gain settings because they think they are starved of sound.

I doubt there is any factual basis for the content of this article. People with MS may have all sorts of fatigue that has nothing much to do with the MS. This looks like something dreamt up by a healthcare marketing outfit, not science!

One might think that psychiatry, having no reliable base, might be where angels would fear to tread - perhaps that's the problem.

If placebos were legitimate for subjective symptoms surely they would be even more legitimate for objective measures? If they worked.

I think this is a misconception, John. The problem with placebos is that they tend to work in contrived artificial situations like trials in a way that they do not outside trials. And most of the time what is called a placebo effect is some other spurious reason for improvement. The key problem...

What I think we need is activist Andean geese. They have been discriminated against for too long now.

Sorry mate but we don't actually need you to survive. If you want to do PR work the first thing to learn is not to let on right at the beginning Dr Horton.

I did eat my greens, miss. (Oh, and I ate a ton of carrots before that blood test to make sure it looked OK.) Since when did 'Hey, eat more greens' become a behavioural intervention that increased vegetable intake?

I suspect that trying to refute such comments simply fans the flames. I doubt that these sorts of views are going to influence thousands of potential volunteers.

I think it is arguable as to exactly what muscle paralysis means. It tends to imply complete loss of movement including reflex movement, although in spastic paralysis reflexes are increased. As far as I am aware paralysis is not recognised as part of ME as now understood. There may have been...

Yes, this is unhelpful disinformation that will confuse people with ME looking for answers. Few if any of these tests have been confirmed to be valid even as statistical differences between groups of patients and controls. Statistical differences are no use as diagnostic tests unless there is a...

I don't understand why the questionnaire cannot ask whether either now or in the past the person has fulfilled the various criteria. CCC and IOM criteria do not have to be applied in the present tense. They remain the same criteria applied in the past tense. The past might actually be more...

That is a pretty weird comment. I wonder in what sense somatic is being used. Any mental component is going to be neurobiological so the statement seems vacuous.

It is very hard to know if there is anything 'consistent' here. Peptide arrays will always appear to give a result. The question is whether it means anything. Cort's reporting of science tends to be uncritical and hyped as you probably know.

It looks like a waste of time to me, sadly. This sort of mass peptide screening technology seems unlikely to find anything. I suspect they are still stuck in the idea of molecular mimicry, which has got us nowhere and makes no sense. What seems tome pity is that there are groups like this with...

The key problem is denominators. I had significant reservations about using any population recruited through the internet for any purpose originally but I was persuaded that for this particular task an internet based sample, if it was big enough, would be of value. For most other studies where...

But the volunteering is going to be dependent on the whole 'feel' of the request. I think the situation is quite different from most other illnesses where sensitivities about being hassled by the wrong people are not in the forefront. Here they are sticking out like a sore thumbfyor a lot of...

It is hard to say what is normal, since the business of mass contacting people and privacy protection is relatively new. Historically it was not considered ethical for anyone to contact patients other than their own medical carers. If I had a list of patients I had studied there was no way I was...

The GLAD study would not have had the make or break issue of getting enough cases because anxiety/depression is much more common. Moreover, there would not be the sensitivity about the 'wrong people' having the ability to contact.

When people sign up to this study, we will ask them if they are willing to be contacted about taking part (directly, or by agreeing to share samples and data from this study) in new studies, either related to this one or unrelated. This will make it much easier for researchers to recruit...