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Do we need to think ourselves about what would be the appropriate information on fitness and exercise for someone with ME? This is not intended as a finished article, rather some tentative first thoughts that might lead to others contributing to a final statement or position. I think this topic...

Three reasons not to read any piece with an arbitrary number in the title: 1. Usually they are written to fill column inches. 2. Prominence of individual items is decided by the literary form not relative significance 3. Seven is the correct number for such lists (eg wonders of the Ancient...

I was not just thinking of doctors and of consultants, but of the health service as a whole, including the various other professionals. I qualified over forty years ago as a speech and language therapist and much of my first twenty years was spent working out what of what we did was evidence...

There are some grounds for offering people treatment based on what is seen as current best practice, even when it does not have a fully established evidence base. Indeed much of what clinicians do in practice is based not on solid research but what they saw their clinical supervisors doing...

A very small sample to draw population wide conclusions, also is there any guarantee that people catching Covid-19 and being admitted to this one hospital are representative of a normal population. I am also puzzled that they don’t mention in the abstract the unambiguously physical sequelae of...

Currently only able to just glance at this tonight and will return to it, however as I become more aware of evidence reports contained in the Guideline Appendices the more I suspect they will prove to be a very useful set of ongoing resources.

I am hopeless remembering details but wasn’t this after Prof (White) had retired and his retirement was given as the reason that the data was no longer accessible, even though the eminent professor was still regularly giving lectures to insurance companies and was subsequently listed as the lead...

An aside, but I still have no idea what is meant by ‘central sensitivity’ in such as the above phrase ‘central sensitivity syndromes’. Have proponents actually defined what it means; whenever I hear it I image it some sort lowering threshold in the firing of neurones or a change in the...

Until we better understand the aetiology of ME we have no clear idea what treatments might or might not be possible. There are a range of options: - that ME is totally reversible by some form of treatment or procedure, such as a cancer that can ‘cured’ by surgically removing the tumour - that ME...

My pattern seems to be developing various dental issues during the more marked relapses in my ME, abscesses, impacted wisdom teeth, dying nerves, then as there is some remission a period of a year or more getting the dental issues sorted. Fortunately my current relapse only resulted in needing...

Is that simultaneously?

Why do we see in this area a rush to produce clinical interventions based on pet theories, without any adequate investigation as to whether there is any evidence for that pet theory or if it is pure fantasy? Because something is a logical possibility does not mean it is a reasonably fancy.

This may illustrate floor/ceiling effects in the cognitive tests used in study conditions. For example I suspect I would score above average or average on a relatively time limited reading task, even though I have only managed to read one entire book in the last six years and that took me over...

Here, here!

My memory of research on treating phobias, albeit forty years out of date, was that the key thing was sufficient exposure to the object of the phobia, at least where there was a specific concrete object such as spiders. Dressing up that exposure in different ways did not make a lot of difference...

They have previously complained about medical professionals who collude with or reinforce false MUS beliefs by doing biomedical testing or making consultant referrals, so this is more of the same reasoning.

‘A common symptom’: I have not checked which clinical definition they are using, but surely PEM is a core symptom, and if they were looking at people who did not have this symptom, not all their sample had ME/CFS.

Luckily I have periods of relative remission in the thirty years of my ME enabling with planning and the right medication a trip to Tibet over twenty years ago, before a dose of flue triggered a major relapse, then to South America and Antarctica fifteen years ago and a trip to Japan under ten...

Such articles assert that ‘functional’ conditions have ‘high healthcare utilisation’ but I wonder if they have the evidence to back this up. Even if they form a significant proportion of medical consultations, if you look at it from the patient perspective do people with conditions so labelled...

Unfortunately too many people love ‘assertive, confident statements’ as illustrated by the people offering blind devotion to such as Dr Myhill.