BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

no, it's not far fetched.
Nina E. Steinkopf recently explored this in her blog post ME, the insurance industry and psychiatry (forum thread here)

Also, Lightning Process is HUGE business, and the health care system is only too happy to have something like that to refer difficult patients to.

In 2012 coach Landmark said 5 000 people had taken it in Norway. Before it was available here, 2 000 went to London. That's 7 000 costumers.
It now costs over 20 000 NOK, but I think the price before was approximately 17 000 NOK.

17 000 NOK X 7 000 clients = 119 000 000 NOK

That's 10026540.8434 GBP 14194887.4548 USD 11690735.8287 EUR
Who knows how much more money they've earned since 2012?

I'm very bad at numbers, so do please correct me if I got anything wrong.

 

There's a clear connection between LP and Reimer too: he and his wife are friends with Live Landmark. He wrote about her in 2014:

Et legetroll i norsk ME-debatt
https://www.dagensmedisin.no/artikler/2014/07/20/-et-legetroll-i-norsk-me-debatt/

And again in 2017:

Blir man bra av KBT, hade man då CFS/ME?
https://www.dagensmedicin.se/opinion/gastkronika/blir-man-bra-av-kbt-hade-man-da-cfs-me/

His wife is from Norway, she studied medicine (rheumatology) at University of Bergen in Norway, and she's Facebook friends with both Landmark and Vogt. She has been known to take active part in the ME and LP debate on social media too.

 

This is an older post but I just had an encounter with this man posting these videos. It was in a FB group called something like Covid research and all the rules there are about serious science, no pseudoscience etc, they even ask if you are a researcher when you join. They welcome researchers currently recruiting etc. So I thought it looked great.

And this guy posts all his videos there himself (and probably in some other covid groups too). So, thinking this was a very science-oriented group, I raised some serious issues in connection with the Gupta Program and that this guy with his videos is not a particularly great source of science based on this. Well, apparently he already has dedicated long hauler fans because they ganged up on me in no time, defending this and all kinds of other woo therapies but mostly the guy as an essential part of the LC community. In a supposedly scientific group. (So I left.)

And this is probably going on elsewhere too: this is a social media guy, he probably posts these in other LC groups as well. So what I'm saying is that I see this man as quite harmful with his educational videos on long covid. Quite harmful and quite popular. I even remember seeing some of his videos in the Hungarian LC group, although not recently.

 

RUN-DMC is a long hauler himself and gained popularity early on in the long covid community by being one of the first to make videos about it. He popularised the supplement regime known as the 'niacin stack' for example (which didn't seem to work for him or many others).

However as he hasn't recovered, he seems to have become more desperate and has fallen for this Gupta nonsense.

There's also the issue of Gupta apparently paying youtubers and other social media influencers to promote his program and to lend credibility (apparently Phil Parker does this too).

Questions asking RUN-DMC how much he is being paid for these videos have been deleted (as well as comments pointing out that the Gupta Program is a well known scam in the ME/CFS community).

On this, he has recently promoted this rather expensive 'conference':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e17Zbr9VD68

Some Long haulers on reddit aren't at all impressed.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1400382049412866049

 

It's very telling that they are having debates. Debates are for entertainment, no problem ever gets resolved trough debate. Negotiation? Sure. Debate? Nope, that's just to get people talking in a hopefully entertaining way, to drive ratings by amplifying controversy.

The way the debate has been set up is obvious propaganda, it isn't even honest debate, it's explicitly trolling to push the agenda. The substance of discussion isn't even relevant, what matters is that one side of the controversy gets all the visibility.

And the medical authorities in several countries are pushing this, completely oblivious to the harm done to the credibility of not just medical expertise but all expertise. They are so arrogantly asserting things without evidence, the very thing experts are supposed to never fall for, there isn't even a measure of doubt in here, they are saying those things as if it's the obvious truth.

 

Åsa Wikforss, a Swedish professor of theoretical philosophy who is often invited by the media to talk about knowledge resistance, disinformation, fake news etc, often emphasizes that it's dangerous to have "debates" about things we know for sure are true. Doing so gives the false impression that the question isn't settled yet. It creates a false balance, which makes objectivity impossible.

Åsa K Hedlund, chairperson of the Swedish Covid Association tweeted earlier today that she had been promised [before the show] that it wouldn't be about cultural illnesses, and that everybody agreed that this is real... She calls it "unethical".

https://twitter.com/user/status/1400421996723376130

 

Here's another article about the Sverige möts programme:

Läkare ifrågasätter postcovids utbredning: “Koppla inte allt till covid”
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/...covids-utbredning-koppla-inte-allt-till-covid

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1401070083779219460


(It's literally always projection with these people)

 

I am unsure about whether this is a joke and it being published in the journal of... biometeorology?!.... really doesn't help make that determination. Legitimately beyond satire.


Post COVID-19 persistent fatigue: a proposal for rehabilitative interventions in the spa setting

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00484-021-02158-1

We suggest that spa facilities including multidisciplinary interventions and trained staffs could be an appropriate setting for providing rehabilitative protocols to treat chronic fatigue in post COVID-19 subjects. Spa treatments may improve the physical symptoms of chronic fatigue and modulate the immune imbalance, reducing persisting inflammation. Moreover, in the spa setting, specific respiratory rehabilitation and neuropsychological interventions could be provided. The rehabilitative protocol could also properly address comorbidities.​

When you absolutely, positively, did not understand what PEM is:

Spa interventions could also act on the physical symptoms associated to chronic fatigue, such as post-exertional malaise, muscle pain, and polyarthralgia (Yancey and Thomas 2012). Aerobic exercise and strength training in mineral-rich water can contribute to improve muscles function and to reduce muscular pain in post-COVID-19 subjects (Masiero et al. 2020b).​

See meeps, this is what we were missing all along: mineral-rich water. It's so simple a child could think of it. In fact, that's a possibility here.

 

Well, it worked for Darwin didn't it? Oh. No. I forgot. It didn't.

 

Long Covid from around 22mins in.
Gaslighting. All in head and academic exceptionalism mentioned
Double Down News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-BTfhc0_e8

 

Ha ha. I might be willing to suck up the BPS nonsense if i got to do it in a sauna having just had a facial... It would certainly beat the awful hospital or doctors surgeries.

 

Why is Britain now the capital of long Covid?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...0?shareToken=1586575306dd66ac70fbca52a4c4b411

It's not all bad, but it tries very hard to "both sides" the issue, presenting a few deniers with no evidence as having answers despite going through pains to state that this is something for which no one has answers.

"Mass hysteria" is a sales job, this is a sales pitch, even if it tries to pretend to be a reasonable devil's advocate. Weak.

 

Jeremy Devine, the resident psychiatrist who wrote the infamous WSJ opinion piece is interviewed:

“People don’t fully appreciate the ability of the psyche to convince itself that it’s sick,” he says. “I don’t think people are overtly malingering. I do think they fall into a cycle of disability and it stems maybe from this subconscious desire to be sick in some cases, maybe just a belief that they are sick rooted in depression and anxiety.

“This is in a way a kind of mass hysteria: the more attention you give a syndrome like this, the stronger it becomes.”

This is where the long Covid debate enters highly contested and fractious territory, striking at the heart of the “mind v body” debate that has consumed physicians since the dawn of medicine.

Devine thinks that the root of the UK’s long Covid abundance is in the fierce debate over myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which has left a deep imprint in the British medical and patient community. “The reason this is so prevalent in the UK is because of the chronic fatigue lobby,” he says. “They have shaped the discourse on long Covid. You guys are the origin.”

 

The end of the article does not bode well for the Long Covid patient group(my bold):

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Even though Britain is focusing on the problem more than many of its peers, disagreements over the causes and nature of long Covid mean there isn’t a clear treatment strategy in place.

Perumal thinks that when no organic basis can be found for a patient’s symptoms, they should be reassured but gently “funneled” out the system over time.

“We should move patients through a system of greater investigation, until we’re left with people for whom identifiable medical impairments are found and for whom treatments may be attempted,” he says.

As the pandemic wanes, the long Covid consultant believes for many this issue may end up fizzling out. But those patients who remain are likely to be in the system for a long time, at significant cost. “They will need a lot of input from physiotherapists, psychiatrists and so forth,” says the consultant. “Those who continue to struggle with this are likely to struggle for a long time.”

 

@dave30th am tagging you as you've written about Jeremy Devine and might find the Times article of interest.

 

3 years ago an ME doctor (bps) in Sweden was looking into offering pwME a “different” kind of rehab, described as “in between” the biomed and the bps approach. It was just an idea at the time, I don’t think anything came of it?

1-week group trips to a health spa in Lithuania (no direct flights from Sweden), shared accomodation.

The main aim would be improved breathing and relaxation in order to increase activity levels.

Some of the suggested spa treatments were geothermal baths, breathwork in a salt room, inhalation of herbs, massage, mindfulness, light exercise, walks etc.

Are you still interested?

 

I can't really see week long trips to Hell selling that well, for some reason.

It's reputed that normally people can go there for free, eventually, so charging.....