Cochrane Review: 'Exercise therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome' 2017, Larun et al. - Recent developments, 2018-19

Certainly don't mean this to be a political post, I just remember how shocked I was when I saw this three years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I

Because it was the first time I had seen a politician brazenly admitting that feelings were more important than facts and treating the interviewer with mocking contempt for not getting it. Well now it's three years later and such an approach is totally unexceptional in politics and, seemingly, in medicine, with Wessely putting psychiatry at the heart of it and everyone, especially governments, happily going along with that. It's a great bandwagon for anyone who is so minded to jump on.

We are doomed

 

YES! I think this is because psychiatry lives in a world where where they typically deal with behavioural problems that are due to faulty perceptions in the first place. If I refused to ever go out of the house in rural England because I was convinced I would get mauled by lions tracking me across the savanna, it would actually be very therapeutic for me to undergo treatment to help correct my screwed up perceptions. Biasing of perceptions from messed up back to normal is good.

But they are so self obsessed with this being the answer to everything and anything, they want to apply it to problems where perceptions are not at all skewed; they pursue it to the extent they try to prove perceptions are skewed, so they can still peddle their false doctrine. It's despicable - insist people have an illness of their definition, to match with the treatments they insist are the right treatments ... for the illness as they define it. This is so much akin to religion, and nowhere near real science.

ETA: And of course MS et.al. have retorted so many time, that it is "because that is how the illness is defined". But of course, whose definition is that?!

 

Even in rural England there are places that if you go to you may be mauled by lions, so psychiatrists may be making assumptions even in that regard.

It is not an unfounded fear, it's just unlikely, if you haven't bought a ticket.

Pretty much everything people are, reasonably, afraid of is unlikely.

This does not make fear a behavioural problem. It makes it a sensible adaptation, something to modify behaviour to increase the odds in our favour.

This is not, if you are rational and unbiased, a bad thing.

It is people with the attitudes that psychiatrists promote that will lead to the death of millions, by encouraging people to believe it's safe to live in earthquake zones or inside a volcano, simply because they've been doing it for a while doesn't make it safe.

Thinking it is, not being afraid, trying to convince people they are unhinged if they have any concerns, that is a behavioural problem, moving somewhere where the damn ground stays were it's supposed to is not.

Similar things could be said about many other issues, where a psychiatrists job is to keep the status quo going, and classify anyone who thinks the status quo is absurd, dangerous, or simply a bad thing, as needing 'treatment'.

This is their function in society, it is not to help patients, it's to make sure the status quo and the interests of the powerful, are maintained.

 

But I think you know what I was saying @Wonko . Here in S4ME I strive to see both sides because it is important for context and objectivity.

There are some problems that are due to distorted perceptions, and can be fixed by perception / behaviour-modifying treatments. Indeed I think it strengthens our argument to acknowledge this - it becomes easier to clarify how treatments valid for one type of condition are so desperately invalid for another. If you suffer from a perceptions / behaviourally-rooted condition, then perception / behaviour-modifying treatment could be applicable; if you don't then it isn't ... yet they insist otherwise, they seem themselves to suffer from seriously distorted perceptions.

 

For a while. It's a self-defeating ideology. Millions will suffer, possibly for years, but the foundations are so weak they won't hold up very long once they are at full speed and billions have to be accounted for. For now it stays within the echo chamber but once it gets mass implementation people not wedded to the ideological foundations, merely interested in the fiscal benefits, will demand to see their ROI, and it won't be anywhere to be found.

It will suck, it already does, but this mad project has the seeds of its own demise baked into it. The best we can do is document our objections as loudly as possible for when we inevitably have to put weight behind our "WE TOLD YOU SO" slaps.

These people have the confidence to go ahead because they assume no consequences will happen to them when it fails. This delusion can be dispelled. With effort, unfortunately, but their confidence definitely does not rise to the level at which they would accept responsibility for failure.

They look to the past where such mistakes lead to no one being punished and think it will happen once again. What a difference the Internet makes. Those mistakes used to happen behind closed doors and with documentation safely stored away from grabbing hands, where it can be burned if necessary. Not anymore. We need to make this as public as possible, hold them up to take responsibility in the future.

 

Plus ça change:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

WB Yeats

 

That might explain why it's taking so long, it's pointed in the wrong direction.

That'll teach 'em to start such projects without bothering to invent sat nav first.

Twenty centuries and it still hasn't got there.

In fact if my memory of plate tectonics is anywhere near accurate it'll most likely be further away than when it started.

 

It might be an idea to find out whose side the rough beast is on as it slouches towards Bedlam. Is it on twitter? Perhaps @Andy could prioritize this as his next outreach project?

 

new band member?
https://www.s4me.info/threads/babcp-band-bedlam-featuring-trudie-chalder-gig.3778/

eta: or Simon Cowell in search of new talent?

 

Hi!

We have a BIG PROBLEM
in the latest communications between the Norwegian Cochrane review regarding:

"define minimal important clinical differences (MICD) for commonly used outcome measures." (see file 13May2019)

see file 24May2019 and 27May2019 (e-mail com: 13may-doknr.12, 24may, 27may, (28may, 29may, not shown edit: shown); doknr.11/13)

They can NOT define MICD in a allready written review for use to effect size. It is like starting a new research study within.

This is what happend when PACE and ie Stubhaug alter outcome and cut-offs

1

There is no consensus and there is little research-data done in ME/CFS.

BIG S*IT problem.

Need someone to alert @Andy @Tom Kindlon @Jonathan Edwards ++

Regards
Marit

Do not overlook the fine Tovey 24may ;-)

 

Where did these emails come from? I'm glad Tovey is not bending, but I wonder if they authors are expecting his replacement to be a push-over?

I agree "minimal important clinical differences" cannot be defined as something so trivial and more importantly, clinical differences need to be relevant to patients (which requires a study in itself), they can't merely be defined as the smallest possible change on a questionnaire as these authors seem to want.

David Tovey recommended:

Yet the review is still there!?!

 

2017/10566 - F08 Exercise Therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome - Cochrane review

https://einnsyn.no/saksmappe?id=http://data.einnsyn.no/noark4/Saksmappe--983744516--10566--2017

 

Just to clarify for people, the website Marit links to is the source of these documents.

 

New Editor- in - Chief has been in place since June 1st? Am I right? What is her view? ( Hope I’ve remembered correctly that it is a ‘she’. Don’t remember reading anything about her).

 

Well, in that case, it is useful to have the former Editor-in-Chiefs last thoughts on the subject in the public domain.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1118040833469685760

https://www.cochrane.org/news/appointment-new-editor-chief-cochrane-library