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Do we have that on record? It would seem pretty hard to substantiate the claim that people who need professional brainwashing techniques do not have strong enough beliefs to act on!

I have been thinking this over recently. The BPS model that informs Chalder's CBT does not so much imply that patients know before hand exercise is bad for them. It is very clearly based on the line of argument (in Wessely, Chalder et al 1989) that the problems that patients BELIEVE that...

Sorry Inara, but Cheshire is right here. The failure of PACE has no impact on the theory because the results are uninterpretable either way and do not test the theory as such anyway. The only way it might disprove the theory is if we could reliably say that CBT made people say they were better...

Yes,there are political forces of all sorts resisting the truth. But the only way to win the argument is to keep pointing out the truth. I am not sure which judges would support psychosomatic theories. What contexts would this arise in? My experience with patent courts is that they are actually...

We address the psychosomatic theorists simply by pointing out that there is no science there, no coherent hypothesis and no evidence from a valid way of testing the hypothesis. That is a big task but it is a simple one because there IS no science, just speculation. Nobody actually knows what...

I understand the desire to show ME is biological but I think this approach may backfire. At present we have no quality publications that demonstrate that ME is 'biological' in the sense I think you mean. There may be 10,000 papers discussing findings that might suggest there are biological...

This provides interesting background for the PACE debate. It confirms the concerns we have had about CBT in PACE. But it also sheds light on psychotherapists' views on it. It seems that maybe some psychotherapists do not like having to use CBT all the time. It suggests that the glib use of...

I am encouraged by the CV. It seems that he is someone who takes seriously the job of independent assessor and his own research looks sensible and quite imaginative, at least at first glance. He is into physiological disorders.

Sciatica is something with the disc and a significant proportion of 'healthy' people have it. Symptoms in a single root like this - going down to the heel - are almost certainly sciatica rather than a radiculopathy of more unusual cause.

Yup, undiluted immunobabble.

Laura Campbell said she would pass my message to somebody else.

It isn't. But I think part of that is that it is another example of a senior partner not bothering to read what is published in their name.

Yes, I think some sort of internal comparison would be best. But if you sort people by brain abilities you may drag along another confounding correlation. What might be ideal would be showing a difference between PWME of viral onset and those with gradual onset or something like that.

Yes, but I think that connection is also too vague to be a reliable pointer. Inflammation of nerve roots, or radiculopathy, is normally easy enough to diagnose clinically on the basis of a specific pattern of physical signs. People with ME in general do not have that pattern. I think it is...

I think the problem is that none of this can be factored out because we simply do not know how these processes work. I raised this with Neil Harrison when he showed a signal in the basal ganglia on one side after giving something like interferon or typhoid vaccine to a group of patients. He...

That all seems a bit vague. It does not sound like anything that would explain her illness to be honest. serve root inflammation usually produces symptoms like sciatica. Hopefully there may be a proper scientific report drawn up.

Where does that information come from?

But that is exactly my point. A person who knows that they are being tested as a patient may specifically respond to the tricky stroop tests in a different way just as the jazz musician may specifically respond to the riffs from the new member in a different way if they are playing a tune they...

Nothing very vague, I would say. Think of the mindset of a jazz player in a jam session whose brain is set to respond to each phrase from other musicians with a further interpretation of "Ain't Misbehaving' " rather than "Honeysuckle Rose". All his responses are conditioned by something he may...

I have emailed Laura Campbell to suggest she logs on.