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The type of psychiatrist who uses ECT is not scum I can assure. Those dealing with severe psychotic illness are the salt of the earth. They have seen so much real misery that they know they have to do the best for people. The long term effects are well documented and they are acceptable.

Memory loss is very real. Shared holiday memories are lost. But after talking about the past and looking at photo albums it comes back over a period of years. It is distressing but it is a trivial price to pay for having your loved one become the person they used to be again. Nothing can be...

I think it is a mistake to judge a treatment on one's initial emotional reaction. Appendicectomy is pretty barbaric and revolting but it has saved thousands of lives. So has ECT I think. My understanding is the evidence for effectiveness is cat iron - in part because there are dose response...

This is an abstract for a presentation at a British Society for Rheumatology meeting, not paper. Nevertheless it will have been passed by independent reviewers. There was a time when drivel like this did not get through.

I think this is unfortunately true. I have been lucky enough to gain a reputation. Not maybe the sort that gets you elected as president of cosy academic institutions, but I am regarded as maybe the most successful clinical researcher of my generation at UCL. People to whom Horton would defer...

Oh dear, @chrisb, I am going to have to put those quotes in my notebook and I am struggling with an iPad in foreign parts just now. Does @dave30th knowof these?

I was asked to review the most recent exercise therapy study. What was interesting was that as an independent peer reviewer I was told that I should not consider the quality of the evidence because that was done in house! Needless to say I ignored these instructions and assessed the quality of...

The 2014 study is about antibodies to adrenergic receptors as far as I can see. If you find autoantibodies like this that you think might cause an illness then to validate the finding you would normally test for other antibodies with your assay system in order to show that they are not there and...

The situation is complex but i will try to be specific. Thyroid antibodies are a well recognised exception. They are very common in healthy people and more common as asymptomatic associations with things like RA. Because they are so common ( maybe 1 in 5 normal people) it is not unexpected that...

Yet you might get people with rheumatoid arthritis or lupus or hypothyroidism saying the same thing and it is unlikely that what is experienced is particularly similar- just that in each case it is not normal tiredness. I personally see no real similarity between ME and MS. I think the idea...

I have a specific worry with this study. It seems they have found antibodies to angiotensin receptors in most POTS cases. But they have also in the past found antibodies to adrenergic receptors in most patients. They state, as must be true that some patients have both - apparently quite a lot of...

I am rather sceptical. What exactly are the years of hard work? As far as I can see the material in the report is obvious - anyone could say it. And I see no reason to think it will lead to any concrete action since people have been saying it for years. I doubt there is any opportunity to...

I thin I think Dr Crawley might already be regretting volunteering for this. There is an old saying: Anything you say may be taken down in a notebook and used as evidence.

A number of us, when members of another forum, published a review of this in Fatigue and Biomedicine. Relication was highlighted, together with brain imaging and immunology. As much as anything what we need is a single meeting place for researchers where patients are also welcome. In the past...

All I can think of is that he is desperately trying to save his career. And being at Oxford he will have come to think nobody else matters and nobody will take him down in the end,. He is wrong. I was at Oxford once too.

I don't think there is any need for concern @Lucibee. Sharpe is making more and more of a fool of himself. Nobody is paying David to damage an area of research. He is being paid to foster honest peer review. Nothing David has said can legitimately be construed otherwise. The only time this...

Then I agree. An environmental clinic specialising in ME and fibromyalgia sounds like a scam. If it is a government run scam something seriously weird seems to be going on. Edit: it does seem to a government run scam. They educate people about diseases that have nothing to do with the...

I am not sure hat environmental medicine cares for anyone. As far as I know environmental medicine departments are mostly involved with public health measures designed to protect everyone. I don't actually think this is what 'environmental illness' means to anyone medical. Usually when there...

I don't think that sort of categorisation adds up. Tuberculosis can be neurological or a rheumatology all illness. Rheumatoid arthritis is not a joint disease but is seen by rheumatologists. Endometriosis is a peritoneal disease. You can cut them lots of ways. There are recognised...

I would suggest it should follow what Wessely himself says in 1989: However, the available evidence indicates that reconditioning is not actually a significant problem inME/CFS.