Deep phenotyping of post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, 2024, Walitt et al

Their 'reasoning' is "illness without disease". It satisfies the surrounding if(x) statement where x = we are not actually ill.

They often say that they believe we are experiencing the symptoms we think we are, but they only mean by that that we do have psychological conversion of distress and/or fear and/or catastrophizing and/or whatever where it feels like we perceive those symptoms. But of course they lie. A lot. They have to. Their entire models are built on a lie, derived from an original failed conditional.

Everything else is consistent with their beliefs. It makes no sense because it doesn't bother making sense. Models like this are very easy to destroy in a single move, so their only hope is to keep repeating the same nonsense, knowing that almost no one else in the profession cares, and that science and technology does not invalidate their models. Which will inevitably happen, but until then the delusions reign.

 

Thing is, the question ‘I want my fatigue to go away’ and the like is NEITHER

what person who has fatigue could answer anything other than yes to that? - it’s a no win leading question depending only on whether you have fatigue

and not depending at all on anything mental

what does saying ‘no id like my fatigue to stay like this and get worse forever’ ACTUALLY mean?

and how can someone who doesn’t have fatigue be qualified to answer this? There is nothing to stay or go..,

so most of these don’t even test whether someone is thinking about their illness in any rumination sense just answering questions they’ve been asked about not even how they perceive their symptoms but … well what?

do they ask people who’ve broken their leg if they want their leg pain to lessen

or if they want their leg to heal straight and work

and interpret that as … what?

it’s utter game-playing weaponising of the term/job description mental health with which responsibility should be encumbent to just ask any old thing that has no indicator at all re: mental anything. The only thing it can be answered on the basis of is real medical symptoms

so it’s a psychologising/misogynising/bugiting scale that asks about medical symptoms in questions that aren’t mental health dependent or influenced them claims if someone has ‘faituge’ or an injury that ‘you’d naturally like to heal or be sorted’ somehow that’s psychopathology on the basis of the interviewers assumption the fatigue or broken leg doesn’t exist? Even if it does?

what a weird choice if scale.

it’s like a physical illness —> psych illness currency converter by simply if you are conned enough to put a pencil to paper on it if you have a physical condition. So naughty ?

 

I’ve no idea how they blagged validity claims when it’s just about internal consistency aped by only doing it on people with or with the named symptom. And the logic of each sentence making it n/a fit someone without it and must be ‘yes’ for those with it. It’s like a trick to confirm their groups.


if you had a bunch of healthy people who’d been made to do a five day army training their answers would be no different to those who had a serious illness. Because the only logical / makes sense answer from anyone exhausted is pre-determined as apparently meaning ‘catastrophisation’ when actually it’s ’what any normal person with a pain or exhaustion should logically answer’

if you artificially induce the same symptom in people who don’t have either the disease or any catastrophisation or mental health anything and they answer the same as those ill with those symptoms then what is it testing but that ‘induced’ or ‘real’ symptom and the logical answer related to the leading question.

 

Yep. If any of these folk suffered from, say a peanut allergy, they would experience a very rational fear causing them to avoid eating peanuts - fear doing exactly what nature intended. Fear avoidance behaviour seems very reasonable and sane to me. Why do these people brand it as a psychological fallibility? They seem to experience an irrational fear avoidance of common sense.

Edit, just to add: It's not about fear avoidance behaviour per se, but about whether that behaviour is rational or not. In many cases it is very rational, but these psychs like to brand it as if all such behaviour is irrational.

 

It is interesting that I have the same experience. It is not that I am afraid of heights but that my body freezes. Several years ago I was at an art installation in Düsseldorf, where the Kunstgalerie was made up of two tall nineteenth century buildings joined by a three story glass atrium. The installation consisted of a net slung across the atrium just below the ceiling that people could access. With my eyes open I just froze at that height though I could move freely if I had my eyes shut or if I held someone else’s hand.

 

I remember when I was much younger going to watch the film "Where Eagles Dare" when it first came out, in a fancy cinema that had a very wide screen, completely immersive. The opening scene is of a plane flying over mountains, and it suddenly flies over this huge valley - the sense of vertigo was very real for a moment. (But no fear avoidance behaviour ... I still stayed in my seat .)

 

Avindra Nath, being interviewed for the HealthRising blog —

"We hope that one of the major takeaways from our study is that we have convincingly demonstrated the biological basis of the disease that cannot be explained by deconditioning and psychological factors."



Paper says —

 

That seems contradictory, but is it that deconditioning only counts at max performance but max isn't what is most relevant when looking at MECFS?