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Your post. Yes ;) . One slight disagreement, re: costs. Legislation* provides for those contributing to an Inquiry to be re-imbursed including for legal representation, however costs are at the discretion of the Inquiry panel and you are quite right that there would almost certainly be ongoing...

Main article is paywalled but this abstract is worthy just for the phrase: "synthetic certainties" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34240651/ Travis Proulx, Richard D. Morey First Published July 9, 2021; pp. 671–681 PMID: 34240651 DOI: 10.1177/17456916211017098 Abstract More than 40...

I think the start would be to state precisely what objectives are being sought. From that we get potentially different ways of doing things, but also how those ways may conflict. This is what VES wrote: "A new and robust strategy is required, aimed at addressing the historical damage caused...

The question I think has to be somewhat more complex because what is being asked for is a Public Relations effort and a Public Inquiry, so that the terms of one necessarily define the other and vice versa. We might begin by asking what is the expected outcome of these symbiotic efforts and from...

I agree pretty much with everything in your post excepting about Cochrane - we really need to wait until Hilda Bastian has completed her report - unsurprisingly delayed because of her extremely valuable running commentary on COVID vaccines...

Going for an inquiry would inevitably define any PR strategy. First order of battle would be the garnering of media and political support, the former if achieved having a symbiotic (or parasitic !) influence on further iterations of the strategy. Secondly, if there is any success at the...

Sorry if that seems implied - I was referring to the impact of a Public Inquiry, it would necessarily place parts of the NHS under intense examination and that will likely produce a sense among many in the NHS that "here is yet another attack on us" even though that is not what we would want the...

Edit - just to note that I cross posted with Valerie - the sequence maybe makes this look a bit passive/aggressive or otherwise unfriendly. Absolutely not my intention VES has made many important contributions in her blog and on patient forums in the past, her writing is always clear and well...

Overworked and under resourced path labs relying on technicians given production line schedules providing reports signed off by overwhelmed specialists provided to GPs lacking skill or resources to critically appraise. Check - Repeat.

From: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323982#causes "Having an abnormally high level of neutrophils in the blood is known as neutrophilic leukocytosis, also known as neutrophilia. Rises in neutrophil levels usually occur naturally due to infections or injuries. However, neutrophil...

Not forgetting of course that "correlation is not causation". It also might be more accurate to say that: 'a complete blood count can confirm that the body is responding to an apparent infection' - allowing that in the absence of an identified infective agent something other than infection may...

A useful article on the limits of knowledge about Long Covid from Stuart Richie - a psychologist but note he quotes the JoHP special edition on PACE with approval ! https://unherd.com/2021/06/does-long-covid-really-exist/ "And, as we wrote, there’s also a risk of “Long Covid”. We linked to a...

Indeed - GWAS is going to find out if there are identifiable genetic commonalities - or not ! It maybe that there will be a number of niche commonalities that offer different lines of investigation relevant to various sub groups of the ME/CFS population, and if we are very lucky some of those...

Where pathophysiology is concerned, the UK BPS psych school* initially adopted the grotesque position espoused by McEvedy & Beard(1970), that there was no pathophysiology in ME patients, only psychopathology. And then as the M & B nostrum became untenable in face of reasoned challenge, the UK...

Effectively 'the' defining statement of 'where we are'. Pretty grim after what should have been 60 years of meaningful research, but good science frequently starts with the honest admission 'we haven't got a clue', so we can be hopeful.

I think this analogy works: If we imagine a person walking down a steepening slope; at some point they are caused to fall and tumble for some distance out of control. That they suddenly 'flew' into the air would be for most of us a hugely disturbing view and we inevitably look for immediate...

PVF is a convenient label to put on a frequently observed occurrence - that some people following some infections (including bacterial, fungal ?) experience unusual levels of fatigue. Here we have the same correlation/causation problem as with CFS - does the pathology causing the fatigue result...

Yes "correlation is not causation" - if we take 100 post covid19 patients who are experiencing continued symptoms, and we accept that a number of such patients will eventually regain good health without any intervention, then it is inevitable that for a percentage of those patients recovery...

It may be at the top end of reasoned estimates but 250k for a 67 million population does not rely on the extreme rates proposed pscy focussed studies e.g https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-3-19 One of the oddities of ME/CFS research is that wholly arbitrary age...

The notion of continuous or recurrent infection as foundational and causative (i.e the unique biological event from which all subsequent symptomology proceeds) has arguably provided the greatest misdirection in biological ME research (psych research of course has provided an entire encyclopaedia...