Search results

A study by the German Association of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies is making a lot of headlines right now, attributing a contraction of the German economy in 2023 to record illness, whereas without it, without COVID essentially, it would have grown. Was sickness pushing Germany into...

This is like a group of economists who claim that going to cheap stores and food banks causes poverty. They got it completely backwards but are so full of themselves that even when they find exactly what they should expect, they argue it backwards anyway. These quacks will be studied for a long...

Paywall? Meet ladder: https://archive.is/aSfrg

You gotta love when they add this meaningless but on a... (OK imagine the rest is in all caps)... tv show that is literally about endorsing products by investing in them! I mean for sure they don't endorse the product if they all decline, but this episode made the headline by all the investors...

So basically exactly the stuff that medicine refuses to work on, chooses to deny because it hurts their egos. From the methodology section, it was pretty close to random, so this is likely to be representative of the MAID population in general. Damn this is bleak.

Seems kind of weird what with pretty much all control measures having been stopped for a while now. So that judgment should also apply to the current lack of protections, and so is very unlikely to win. It should pass, but might is right. At best it would drag on for years. As long as this...

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

It's one of the most common frustration I see expressed in the LC community. Doctors seem to think that we want to be told that there is something wrong, but we know there is, what we want to know is what's wrong, and being told that they can't find it when there clearly is is never going to be...

Over. Under. What are words, really? So close to getting it. And yet so far.

Good article written by a psychiatrist (Tom Molmans, @Molbaas on Twitter) that does not mince words about the need to recognize that medicine has done explicit harm to chronic illness sufferers as a necessary condition to making progress for us and in Long Covid. Opinion: Think about what went...

Yikes. The main takeaway from papers like this is that such claims: are probably just as suspicious as the rest, and that those treatments don't actually make any difference. For sure neither clinicians nor researchers can tell the difference. Maybe they aren't, but when you find a batch of...

Just like with the biopsychosocial approach. It's not necessarily the CBT, or the GET, it just, as Wessely put it, "might be of help to some". It could be changing your mindset, eating well (even if you already did, I guess you just have to eat even better), having good sleep hygiene (even if...

Hopefully it's a bit of self-contained drama that does no long-term damage, but might as well document it. Following the US senate hearing, and especially how it has featured the decades-long past failures to address chronic illness like ME/CFS, not as much as it should but still, a small group...

Could be relevant to Long Covid given growing evidence of the innate immune system playing a role. Basically newer variants are better at evading the innate immune system, which possibly explains why they cause less severe acute illness, but that then gives them more ability to spread throughout...

Evolution of enhanced innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 Omicron subvariants Nature, open access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-023-01588-4 Abstract Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) human adaptation resulted in distinct lineages with enhanced...

Ironically, this has been the main consequence of medicine "accepting" depression over the last few decades, but framing it mainly as a motivation/mood issue. They can too easily blame anything on the same idea. And it's true for some, but they can't tell the difference, and have collectively...

This reminds me of a local scam we have around here: Pure hazelwood. They're jewelry, usually bracelets, made of hazelwood that are claimed to heal all sorts of things. But the best part is that their healing effect "wears off" after a while, so you have to keep buying them regularly. It's even...

Ahhh yes, the old button soup method. What's in the soup? A button, of course. Just a button, that's what makes it button soup. And vegetables. And bones. And spices. And herbs. And some meat. But without the button, it's not button soup.

Found in the comments. I hadn't bothered to look whether there was, uh, "research" backing this but, yeah, of course there is, and it's similar to the usual biopsychosocial drivel: https://acuseeds.co.uk/blogs/articles/what-are-ear-seeds-and-how-do-they-work. You could easily cook up some...

Subject to an apology? It's still published, and the apology seemed more in line with "sorry you misinterpreted it, but we stand by it". That's not really an apology. Argh.