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This looks to me like a complete lame duck. The four proposals are the basic minimum that nobody even needs to be told about. What we need are some real changes. For instance sending all Covid19 cases to dedicated fever hospitals not ordinary hospitals. Enforced quarantine. Shutting down air...

This looks to me like a complete lame duck. The four proposals are the basic minimum that nobody even needs to be told about. What we need are some real changes. For instance sending all Covid19 cases to dedicated fever hospitals not ordinary hospitals. Enforced quarantine. Shutting down air...

Abstract from the citation above. Erythrocytes naturally capture certain bacterial pathogens in circulation, kill them through oxidative stress, and present them to the antigen-presenting cells (APCs) in the spleen. By leveraging this innate immune function of erythrocytes, we developed...

It is not that red cells act as antigen presenting cells but, as the citation says, that they can carry antigen and pass it to antigen presenting cells in spleen. We have known about this for maybe fifty years. The red cells pick up antigen in association with complement via the complement...

I get the impression that Paul Garner may have a significant positive impact within Cochrane as time goes by. To begin with I was not sure that he really understood the depth of the problem with therapist-delivered treatments. I think he may now be coming to see just how rigged the system is.

I am not sure it means anything. Antibody levels do not prove reactivation. The other variables tested look irrelevant. The Swedish study looks to me like re-inventing the wheel. The sad fact may be that if a fashion for biological research in ME starts up it may largely be wasted on repeating...

Lazy so-and-so. But no doubt the experts here can help him out.

I agree it has some merit. But the most logical approach I suspect is to get people with ME to stand for extended period to train their deep veins to constrict. That is what you have to do when recovering from lying in bed for a fortnight after surgery for instance. But getting people with ME to...

They callout a hypothesis but they also say it is a fact (in the title). Science often accumulates wrong hypotheses pushed as facts, unfortunately.

I think you may be confusing the sensation of high pressure in your face and mucous membranes with high pressure in the brain. The skull is rigid so the volume of blood in the brain is unlikely to change. The arteries do have a regulatory mechanism which you can see acting on fMRI as different...

If you prod a duck, @Trish, you are likely to hear a quack. Like those whoopee cushion things it is always entertaining to prove it is a whoopee cushion once, but that's enough. ON the other hand the beauty of S4ME is that with people prodding this and that duck over the years the consistency of...

The point of tests is not to correlate completely with clinical features - they would be valueless if they did. The point is to tell you something different - something that helps explain, or which gives more objective evidence for future record.

To be clinically useful you need a measure that is clearly above some threshold that you can regard as normal. Very often that is arbitrarily defined as two standard deviations above a mean on a test report but in practice there tend to be more specific thresholds based on experience with that...

Grow your own lettuce maybe.

@Graham, I think you are entitled to insist on a print out of all your CRP results in the last 6 months. Managing your problem without that is not sensible. Your GP may have the results but I doubt they do, or at least not in a readable form. Patients are entitled to their results. I would even...

I have not seen any indication that testing gives a meaningful indication of the real number of people infected. I work on the basis that mortality is probably about 1% and may be falling if the proportion of care home cases is less. The number of deaths lags by maybe three weeks but has...

I am sorry to hear that the problem is not resolving, Graham. Your assessment the situation sounds fair. In my view you need CRP measurements twice weekly until you have a normal one (less than 3mg/100ml) and then weekly until you have three normal ones. Only then would I recommend stopping...

I have not gone through all the linked material but I am unclear whether or not this talk of CAT is in the context of ME, or chronic fatigue, or actually neither. It seems to be thrown in sideways. I am afraid that anyone who writes this would make me run a mile: Together with your therapist...

The message I get is not good. It seems to be 'don't bother with CBT which is dodgy as PACE shows - go for CAT, which is personalised and collaborative so must be good and doesn't even need to be tested to know it works'. Cognitive Analytic Therapy sounds a whole order of magnitude worse than...

I don't think the CPET is a valid test of PEM. PEM is an unexplained symptom that may have nothing at all to do with what CPET measures. CPET was never validated as a measure for clinical use in individuals anyway. It was simply claimed to show a statistical difference between patients and...