A unifying theory for cognitive abnormalities in functional neurological disorders, Fibromyalgia and CFS (2018), Mark J Edwards et al.

@adambeyoncelowe It's always good (if a bit nauseating) to know what this crowd is up to.

Although I'm at the point where it's not enough to keep track of Edwards et al

I'd like to point out, if you go to the bottom of the page you'll see that their funding came from Wellcome Trust, the MRC and some spanish funder I've never heard of.

As far as I'm concerned Wellcome and MRC should be called out for funding this load of crap.

Unified Theory Even their wording makes it sound grandiose.

 

This is actually a really interesting study of unexplained cognitive deficits in medical researchers. It admirably demonstrates that if you want to see just how severe their cognitive deficits are get them to get a visiting Portuguese student to write a review article for an obscure offshoot of the BMJ and see just how bad a piece they are prepared to publish. It is an extremely reliable way of indicating just how little researchers understand what they are going on about.

 

For me, its quite validating to see these researchers expose the true mindlessness of their ideas. I found it frustrating when we had a conversation about Edwards on PR a while back and some were saying he was heading up "real", "legitimate" research. Because he used some neuro-terminology that sounded convincing if you didn't look too hard.

 

I've come to delight in this pic appearing at unexpected intervals in our discussions... Makes me smile more each time I see it. Like savouring a joke only we understand.

 

Oh that's what it is. I thought it might be baloney, not knowing what either of them are or look like. I got the general gist anyway.

Whilst it's on my mind, I thought I'd better google "poppycock" to see what it is and what it looks like too. I must confess I was rather worried about what I might find, but it's ok:



This thread is in danger of being seriously derailed.

 

Beurk!

 

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. But in this case, the evidence clearly shows the absence of their brains.

 

Subtext? The message is right there in figure 1: cognitive symptoms are the result of patients paying too much attention to functional symptoms.

A lot of this functional/psychosomatic nonsense seems to be born out of an emotional need to silence patients complaining about symptoms that cannot (yet) be understood or treated.

 

There's a certain irony when someone chooses a profession -- psychology -- where your everyday work is about attending to psychological matters and then you go on to accuse others of a psychological issue via over-attending to bodily sensations. One could accuse them of perhaps attending too much to psychological interpretations of whatever crosses their path.

And I think the explanation does work on some people for a while ie they buy into it initially when it's suggested to them. Because when you are initially sick you may well attend to symptoms in an effort to understand what is happening to you-- to make sense of your own experience. Of course after a while it becomes painfully obvious that even if you stop attending to those symptoms they don't resolve.

Sadly, at this point the theorists aren't interested in adapting their theory to the patients reality.

 

A bit like science has been, you mean.

 

The limitations section after the Discussion is worth noting. Throughout the paper "heterogeneous" crops up a lot.


Limitations
Evidence for the presence and characteristics of cognitive abnormalities in FNDs, FM and CFS is remarkably heterogeneous.

Sample sizes were usually small, and a control group of healthy subjects was often lacking. In Vercoulen et al,28 objective cognitive impairment in a minority of patients with CFS was sufficient to drive between-group differences towards statistical significance. In these disorders, population heterogeneity means that small sample sizes and the use of average scores (rather than, eg, the proportion of individuals performing below threshold) might conceivably lead to false-positive results.

 

The question is - is it contagious?

 

Also selection criteria for ME/CFS are not discussed anywhere nor the magic phrase PEM.

As a side note, I'veI've across quite a few people in my area are diagnosed as having ME/CFS but with psychological trigger such as a nervous breakdown rather than a viral or infectious one.

This paper would seem to be be addressing that population.

 

Yes?

 

Some seem to be far more prone than others.