BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

This post is all about Hanne Kjöller's article, NOT mango, just to make it clear!

I can't see any reason why sentence 1 leads to the conclusion in sentence 2. Any author suggesting this sees humans as a group as amorphous lumps whether they come from Croydon, Oslo, Adelaide, or Outer Mongolia.

It implies that every country has the same illness and health problems so therefore each country's sick people should be reacting to the same infection in the same way and with the same sequelae which is absolute nonsense.

As an example...

There are parts of China where selenium deficiency is common. I looked up the symptoms of selenium deficiency on wikipedia and found this :

Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenium_deficiency

It has been clear to me from the limited reading I've done on Covid-19 that zinc deficiency and vitamin D deficiency increase the chances of catching covid, and lead to more severe symptoms in those who do catch it.

COVID-19: Poor outcomes in patients with zinc deficiency

Vitamin D deficiency aggravates COVID-19: systematic review and meta-analysis

So an author suggesting that differences in outcome from Covid-19 cannot be blamed on biomedical illnesses and must be due to psychological or psychiatric causes is suffering from a severe degree of stupidity.

 

I especially love this because no country has made significant efforts to count LC so this claim is especially misleading. The numbers are expected to vary, especially as some countries simply refuse its very existence. Even the UK has vastly different numbers depending on who counts and how. As expected when eyeballing something without a known numerator or denominator.

And of course the numbers from China are actually pretty much in line. If one checks. Roughly, but still they are similar. All one has to do is check. It's not as if Covid numbers were themselves vastly different and I hope the suggestion is not that the same cultural whatever also explains why Covid infections are vastly different between countries.

This is exactly how the concept of mass hysteria came about. It's so bloody obvious by now. With primitive technology that cannot even verify the existence of pathogens, those arguments won out and became myths.

Wellness is basically a religion. Good people are healthy and fit. Bad people are poor and sick. There isn't much more to this.

 

As my daughter said to me recently.
Mum, I must have had a bloody brilliant previous life !

 

A great song and dance was made about ME being the latest example of millennium fever with all of us going mad because it was 1999. Not a word said about it in 2021 when we are still here, still ill and numbers not getting less.

Wessley and co made a lot of ME being spread by social media despite the fact it had been defined long before the internet.

It was also blamed on being a "fashionable" disease so everyone was just jumping on the bandwagon.

 

but it is only medical professionals that create fads and trends in their field of so called expertise . it is about time they put the trend of patient blaming to rest.

 

If nothing else, I would suspect that the death rate from covid varies from country to country*. In countries where the death rate is higher, you might see proportionally fewer long-covid cases simply because some people who might have gone on to develop long-covid did not survive. Conversely, you might expect to see more long-covid cases in countries with the highest survival rates.

*ETA:
Covid case death rate in the US is currently about 2.7% (475K). https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
About 2.2% of covid patients are ill for 12 weeks or longer. https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/long-covid

 

According to posts on Twitter (I haven't been able to verify the source because of the paywall), Dr Judith Bruchfeld from the Covid clinic at Karolinska has commented on Kjöller's article:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1358800777800785924

 

Good response but this part here... this is how it's always done. There is no other process by which this model has ever been proposed or taken hold. In the end it's time that cements those baseless claims, if technology cannot stop them in their tracks, but this is how it's always done. Something to consider when promoting this very concept in similar circumstances.

Or does this physician think other concepts of "cultural maladies" or "mass hysteria" ever came about with actual evidence that did not ignore the literature and reality? I can easily imagine it makes sense to that person to think of ME this way. Despite the massive overlap.

 

I have only read the press release. There may be some useful points in there

https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-02/oupu-hro020821.php

 

The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet had a paywalled article on Monday about Long Covid where they've interviewed among others prof. Vegard Bratholm Wyller who apparently is going to do research on this patient group Seems he will be building on his previous research on Epstein Barr infection where he believes the infection is leaving some kind of symptom "imprint" or "echo" in those who do not recover.

The article is written by Jorun Gaarder - a journalist who has written articles promoting lightning process, Recovery Norge and a BPS approach to ME.

Wyller estimates in the article that 5-10% of previous Covid patients may struggle with long lasting fatigue after a year. If nothing is done, we may have a new wave of fatigue after corona.

There can be several things in the group with long term symptoms following Covid-19. Some can have continuous heart problems, lung- or neurological problems. But the largest group probably has a kind of post-infectious fatigue which one can see after Epstein Barr and other infections, according to Wyller.

He is going to study this. His goal is to recruit at least 500 previous Covid-patients between 12-25 years old and follow them over time. Then one can see if they have impaired heart muscles or lung capacity, or if there are other things that leads to post viral fatigue.

"To feel one has fever, muscle pain, fatigue and a feeling of not being able to think clearly are common symptoms for such post viral fatigue. A lot is similar, but some things are also different, depending on which infection that was the trigger.

- The patient kind of feels that the infection is still there, even though there is no sign of this in tests. After Epstein Barr virus infection, many complain of continuous sore throat, but after Covid-19 quite a few complain of heavy breathing, which is also typical in the acute phase, Wyller says.

A lung specialist at a hospital for heart and lung disease outside Oslo is also interviewed. They've had 110 Corona patients for rehabilitation so far. He says that many are struggling with fatigue symptoms which they can't explain. Some also have problems with memory. Muscle and joint pain are common, some have sleeping issues and depression.

He says he's careful not to use "long Covid syndrome" as name for this. Once you call something a syndrome, the patient has a diagnosis stuck to him or herself. He prefers to call it aftereffects of corona and says that the patients improve after a rehabilitation stay with them. The prescription is careful increase of exercise, under guidance of a physiotherapist. They also have an inter disciplinary team and have good experience from group sessions and individual sessions with psychologist.
https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/professor-om-langvarig-corona-faresignalene/73372699

 

Discussed here:
https://www.s4me.info/threads/the-i...coffi-2018-katz-et-al.2013/page-4#post-323621

 

I'm not defending Wessely but when I was misdiagnosed with Fibromyalgia people on the forums would say things like "I get tired too so I must have ME as well" so there are people who jump on the bandwagon. I think part of the problem is at some point doctors started diagnosing anyone with unexplained fatigue as having ME.

 

I know what you mean. It is infuriating when someone says that especially if they say they had it but they got better because of X and because they did not give into it like you It is a disgrace that the BPSers reduced the complex systemic disease of ME into the mish mash that is CFS. It was done deliberately and calculatedly to use patients for an agenda, not for any benefit to the patients.

We know it was done knowingly because of the way they said it spread on the internet, yet they knew at the time that many patients had been ill for years before the internet was invented. even today, people who are already sick see a description of ME and realise it explains the things that are already there.

Seeing the disease and then wishing it on yourself is actually a very strange concept, seeing it and lying about it is more possible such as people who fake cancer.

That sort of statement which seems reasonable when you hear it and which has overtones that people pick up on - not really ill, weak minded, deceptive, not to mention the prejudice against the new fangled such as social media - is a speciality of Wessely and his followers. You get over the message you want while it is totally deniable and seemingly innocuous.

 

The Norwegian newspaper Bergens Tidende has a paywalled article today about rehabilitation of Covid-19 patients at the institution "Health in Hardanger" (Helse in Hardanger).

Specialist in heart- and lung physiotherapy, Bente Frisk, says in the article that there aren't any large studies, but they see that Covid-19 patients improve by adapted exercise.

The institution was recently established to offer short term stay and interventions for people with anxiety/depression, back pain, Diabetes 2 or problems with breathing. The clinic is inspired by a "successful 4 day intervention for anxiety".

They've now expanded to offer rehabilitation for "post-Covid, difficulty with breathing and fatigue".

Senior doctor Marte Jürgensen says to Bergens Tidende:

Marte Jürgensen has been in the paper before. She is the 2. leader of Recovery Norge. She is a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with ME and a participant in the RituxME trial. She dropped out of the trial and went to psychiatrist Bjarte Stubhaug who has a CBT/GET/Mindfullness intervention for ME and she recovered fully.

Bjarte Stubhaug's approach is discussed thoroughly in a thread about a trial from him titled: A 4-day mindfulness-based cognitive behavioural intervention program for CFS/ME.

A co author of that study, Gerd Kvale, is one of the main inventors of the "successful 4 day intervention for anxiety".

This is what Health in Hardanger write on their website (google translated) about the Covid-19 rehabilitation:

 

They are counting natural recoveries as the product of their intervention, simply ignoring those who don't and no one's really counting anyway. At least this largely explains why so many people are convinced that it works. And since most will recover from LC, it looks impressive. All it would take is a rigorous scientific evaluation but that will never happen, the outcome is sought. You can easily see it in LC forums, people recovering naturally despite having done nothing special. Or at least going into remission. This is why some trials have waiting list controls, to check for the passage of time.

The same people would laugh at healing crystals that help people recover from the common cold, for the very same reason. And rightfully so. Even though it's the exact same process. But belief overrules everything else, so they do something they would consider laughable in all other circumstances and genuinely cannot find fault with it.

 

Code:

https://twitter.com/TomKindlon/status/1361427332653862913

 

Title : Long Covid: MPs call for compensation for key workers

Link : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56090826

I wondered how well this idea of compensating key workers would go down with the BPS crew.

It would also get messy for the DWP and the government if compensation depended on the job one had at the time of infection with Covid, particularly for those who never got tested.

 

Looks like various parties will now have an incentive to go into "bury it like Gulf War Syndrome" mode.

 

BPS crew are trying to market perverse cruelty. 50 shades of derp.

The question is, who will be running the four studies worth £18.5m?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/covid-long-term-effects-government-b1803614.html

On the face of it the psychs are not invited but there looks to be a danger with the Birmingham study that BPS vampires could try to suck the govts blood and sire a new generation of believers, like they do, by inserting CBT as a treatment protocol which should be tested. It depends who is running the Birmingham study but we should probably consider taking the initiative to try to help them understand the record of unempirical study design and blatant careerist bias from the BPS school over PACE etc.

 

https://www.swissre.com/institute/conferences/expert-forum-on-secondary-covid-19-impacts.html