Search results

A quick question about your 2-day CPET @Hutan. Before the second CPET did you feel dreadful with PEM?

I think that is fair argument @Hutan. However, I think there are subtle differences between phobia desensitisation therapy and CBT. Phobia sensitisation is something that anyone is supposed to be able to do just by exposing the patient to their bogeyman. I did phobia therapy as a student with no...

In this case the thought would be a necessary part of the causal chain, which is all that matters in the general argument. I think the main point is that, no, we cannot conclude anything, because things are so complex.

I am deliberately being the devil's advocate here but I think it is important to do that because some people are I think making too simple an interpretation of these results. Whatever the problem is it is a biological reality but thoughts are biological realities too. Effects of thoughts are...

Actually, I think the relapsing/remitting aspect is in favour of a metastable state of a complex re-entrant signalling system - the main candidates being immune system and brain. Autoimmune diseases arise from faulty feedback in signalling cells that arises at random and can fluctuate wildly...

I think there is a reasonable chance that there is a key signal that could be corrected or blocked.

Thanks Sasha. I would not put too much weight on that. The study is from 20 years ago and apparently not confirmed by anyone else. The first measure is immune complexes. Measuring immune complexes was a bit like making magic potions - highly unpredictable and nobody quite knew what was actually...

I don't think it is as simple as that. Very fit people can develop unhelpful thoughts later on. My wife was a captain of a university swimming team in her youth. Later on she developed a psychotic illness with unhelpful thoughts such that she lost two stone and ended up on a drip feed. I am not...

I disagree with Willy Weir on this. I think things a lot more complicated. Fearful thoughts can lead to major shifts in autonomic function that can change cellular behaviour significantly in the short term. In the longer terms various thoughts leading to patterns of behaviour can change all...

We know the bottom of the success stories. Some people get better and it is highly likely that some of these will have had some CBT or GET shortly beforehand. We expect these stories to exist. But as anecdotes they provide no evidence for causal link between treatment and improvement - the whole...

I think that was probably fair enough. It takes hours for vaccine components to get to the immune system. Even the toxins in old fashioned typhoid vaccine took more than 10 minutes to get into the circulation. Faints with seizures are common enough following injections but they are due to...

I think there is a problem, perhaps particularly in the UK, with medically qualified advocates for ME over-egging the evidence for viruses, vaccines, mitochondria or whatever. The early critiques of the PACE trial were heavily overlain with arguments about how the condition could not be...

New fiends are always helpful. It's the old ones that are the problem.

I don't know what scientific explanations are offered in the literature but I can confirm the existence of the sort of problem you describe. The only time I took zopiclone after perhaps two doses I felt seriously dysphoric, anxious, agitated, irrational and under the impression that I was having...

I find it very hard to work out what these numbers mean. As it stands the abstract seems totally misleading. Whatever the numbers I don't think one sample tells us anything useful.

I think that is right - the idea that blinding removes the possibility of a placebo effect is just garble. Although if by 'placebo effect' we include all the factors that give overoptimistic assessments of responses in trials, including what is often called the reverse placebo effect where it is...

Thanks,it reveals that he has no clue about the difference between what is done and what is adequate. He has no power of critical thinking.

It seems not.

I wasn't invited to this so I don't know much about it. I would be interested to hear what Angela Vincent has to say about neuronal antibodies.

Sorry kd, I think it is a statement of reality alright. Who is kd?