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More than 50 years ago, the immunologist Avrion Mitchison defined T cell help as a function that “lies at the heart of inflammation and other aspects of immunological and infectious disease” Yes, well, dear old Av did as much as anyone to slow down the pace of autoimmune research. Fortunately...

PoTS is supposedly OI without low blood pressure. Other electrolytes like calcium, magnesium and potassium (sodium is salt) are not going to have any relevance to the effect of salt. Potassium is mostly inside cells, not in blood plasma. I rather doubt sea veggies are different from bananas in...

The standard of evidence and practice varies greatly according to how common a problem is and how easy the problem is to understand. Giving insulin for diabetes is based on a lot of good evidence, although it has taken decades for doctors to work out the best way to use it and when I was a...

That's fairly easy. Doctors bullshit all the time. They are trained to bullshit - to sound knowledgeable. It is supposed to inspire confidence. 'Prominent figures in the field' often turn out to be people pushing a line. They are not necessarily prominent in the medical community as a whole. I...

Possibly, but that doesn't in any way require that antibodies are pathogenic and it is still upside down of Sjogren's. I think we can be reasonably sure that whatever it indicates it suggests that ME/CFS has nothing to do with autoimmunity as we are familiar with it in other diseases.

It may seem odd but it is worth remembering that although there have been physicians and hospitals for centuries almost all medical advice was baseless until around 1970 - apart from Caesarian section after sepsis was understood and penicillin around 1945. When I first started medicine all...

There is a vast amount f disinformation around 'dysautonomia', to the extent that I suspect 95% of material put out is pure fantasy. I spent my career studying and treating autoimmune diseases including Sjogren's. Most of it is secondary to lupus or rheumatoid. 'Primary Sjogren's' worth calling...

That sounds like straight nonsense. It looks as if you are quoting from some Harvard health advice page. Presumably it has been dumbed down out of all physiological recognition. I am not sure how solid the evidence is for a causal effect of high salt intake on blood pressure. High salt intake...

And it has been tested - in the PACE trial. Treatments aimed at changing perceptions did change (reported) perceptions, but made no difference to objective measures of disability. The weird thing is that if the predictive coding model is right then the CBT therapist should be telling patients...

Sjogren's and lupus are exceptions. A small proportion of Sjogren's patients also have hypergammaglobulinaemia, which can be substantial. Nobody has much idea why. It probably has little to do with the other features of Sjogren's, which occur in people with normal IgG levels. Sjogren's is a...

Poor old Wyller has not noticed that the predictive coding model of Mark Edwards is back to front.

I can see a problem there that if patients were more active as a result of expectation of improvement, their blood volume might changer as a result of that. It looks as if high salt has no effect on blood volume in healthy people, which is what I would expect. The question is whether people...

I am implying that there may be no cause and effect relation between IgG and illness. The report of improvement and the lower IgG levels may both in some indirect way be effects of something very general - like being overweight for instance (a key factor in Covid-19 illness). In autoimmunity...

I have no idea why it should and I know of no evidence. If you eat salt your kidneys reduce their reabsorption of salt in the tubules and within a short while you have peed it out. There may be a period of feeling thirsty because of a slight increase in body salt concentration. Total body water...

Sounds as if they were very well educated - all the right answers! Maybe the 19% who thought they knew of treatments need a quiet word...

As far as I know there is no physiological reason why eating salt should change blood volume. Salt passes readily by diffusion in and out of the circulatory compartment so it does not 'hold water' in the circulation. I have no idea where this idea has come from but I have never come across it in...

I don't think the differences will tell us anything specific. Immunoglobulin levels in normal people vary greatly, and apparently of no relevance to health. The IgG differences shown are well in the normal range and give us no functional clues to anything. I am happy to accept that...

How on earth do you counteract the risk of inflammation early in life - other than of course having a functioning health service?

I see the limitations of the inquest in a rather different light from Topple. If anything, William Weir threw the coroner under a bus (to use Topple's phrase) by focusing on his speculations rather than what was actually needed. As a result Archer was faced with none of the so-called experts...

That doesn't say anything about transferring purified antibodies. The whole thing sounds like nonsense to me as an immunologist, but I have been wrong in the past now and again. It might make some sense if people with ME/CFS had gut bacteria that normal people do not have but as far as I know...