General thread on functional disorders in Denmark

[NelliePledge]

Seems quite likely that what @bobbler suggests applies

Rather like the whole concept of “functional” really meaning something different the responses could well be “damning with faint praise”

 

[bobbler]

I was thinking that myself, that I'd probably answer politely it's provided some useful tools to not provoke anyone.

The patient association was founded in 2017 and claimed then that 300 000 people in Denmark were suffering from functional disorders. If only 97 patients answered this survey in 2025, and only 21% among them had some improvement (which could be due to a lot of reasons), I do hope this is the beginning of the end of Per Fink's ruling.

Yes so less than 21 people

it could be a common sense assumption to think that those who found their experience was good and recovered would have the most interest in giving feedback to ensure it was there if they had future need. And because I assume they would be less 'haunted by bad memories etc.' in relation to a service itself.

So can't assume this is some tip of an iceberg in the way those who had a bad experience might have thought it better to 'say nothing' by not responding.

It is worth noting that it isn't unusual for discharge/release from certain types of places to be entirely dependent on 'performing recovered' and saying the right things. Hence the potential for a very high perceived risk issue for ticking anything other than vs the recovered/improvement/it was wonderful end of the scale.

Interestingly, I also just did a quick google and found this: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1464019/

Conclusions​

Findings suggest that response bias may significantly impact the results of patient satisfaction surveys, leading to overestimation of the level of satisfaction in the patient population overall.

Estimates of satisfaction may be most inflated for providers with the least satisfied patients, thereby threatening the validity of provider-level comparisons.

 

[Sean]

Damning with faint praise, indeed.

 

[rvallee]

The Patient Association for Functional Disorders (PFFL) shared some less than impressive results today on Facebook from a survey on user experiences from patients at Center for Functional Disorders.

None of the 97 respondents say they have recovered, but PFFL says that's no surprise. PFFL emphasise that most of the respondents say they have received some useful tools. Respondents also say that they can't measure effects when it comes to symptoms, but they have gotten increased insight and quality of life.

A full report is expected to be published soon.

Those are some comically blatant turd-polishing questions. About as expected, I doubt the 'report' will be any less overtly generous, but let's give them the opportunity to not be over-the-top biased.

They were saying boo-urns, they were just saying boo-urns!

 

[Hutan]

@bobbler brought this to my attention:

Good piece by professor Peter Le Cour with also an update about Karina Hansen.
Google translated
Danish newspaper “Politiken”, 4 May 2026.
Feature article by Peter la Cour, Specialist in health psychology, professor

It will be a major and important task for the future Minister of Health to develop a worthy and professionally updated guideline for the disease ME, chronic fatigue syndrome. Unfortunately, he should not count on much assistance from the Danish Health Authority.

https://politiken.dk/.../Behandling-af-ME-patienter-kan...

In my opinion, these stories are stories of medical abuse against very weak patients and their powerless relatives.

I don't know what else to call it. Such patient stories are and have been the source of countless anxiety attacks and states of anxiety even among mildly affected ME patients and relatives. They are literally afraid of being forced to be hospitalized if they express opinions and experiences about the ME disease and its care and treatment that differ from what their doctor believes and may have read on Sundhed.dk. Trust in the medical system is completely gone – which in these cases also seems well-founded.

The ME case is grotesque and has attracted political attention for many years now, but nothing has happened. In 2019, all parties in the Danish Parliament supported an adoption that declared that ME should be separated from the term functional disorder.

This has not happened, and this testifies to a major contradiction between the Danish Health Authority and the Ministry of Health in this matter. The contradiction was further confirmed last year.

About two and a half years ago, the Minister of Health allocated 1.5 million kroner for an impartial knowledge assessment of the disease, so that new professional guidelines could be drawn up. The knowledge assessment was to deal with the disease ME and not functional disorders.

But here too, the Danish Health Authority changed the premises. The knowledge assessment was to be carried out by external actors (consulting firms), and the results were to be available within a year. For unknown reasons, however, it took the Danish Health Authority six months to even formulate a tender for the knowledge collection, which they also had reformulated so that the central question of what kind of disease it is, a physical or a psychosocial disease, was removed.

The knowledge collection resulted in two severely delayed reports of very poor professional quality, and both deal largely only with functional disorders. The reports have been scathingly criticized professionally.
But it was only after a forced access to the documents that it became clear that the consulting firm Implement, which wrote one of the reports, had directly let the functional doctors write text and edit it in their report, so that what was written was completely in line with the functionalist view. The other report did not describe ME patients at all, but a different group. The Danish Health Authority was later furious about the possibility of access to the documents, but it is quite clear that the consulting firms were very interested in writing something that did not bother the Danish Health Authority. In that case, they would not get the next assignment from there. So much for professional impartiality.

This is probably something that could turn out to be the biggest health policy scandal of this decade. The Danish Health Authority is now using the reports as evidence for doing absolutely nothing.

It will be a big and important task for the future Minister of Health to develop a worthy and professionally updated guideline for the disease ME. In any case, it will not come from the Danish Health Authority, which has worked reluctantly and decidedly against necessary changes in the ME area for years.
Peter la Cour

 

[Hutan]

Sorry, I should have alerted @Grigor in that last post

 

[rvallee]

Trust in the medical system is completely gone – which in these cases also seems well-founded.

But here too, the Danish Health Authority changed the premises. ... But it was only after a forced access to the documents that it became clear that the consulting firm Implement, which wrote one of the reports, had directly let the functional doctors write text and edit it in their report, so that what was written was completely in line with the functionalist view.

No system built on maximalist lies and deceit can be trusted. In fact it's an insane position to trust a system that has made it very clear it does not want or need to be seen as trustworthy, because it has all the power it needs to not bother. And because this is the same system that deals with everything, it explicitly makes it all guilty by association, because it is explicitly associated. This is bad for everyone, it's stunning that no one involved seems to understand this, but they'd rather blame social media for that.

 

[Kalliope]

PFFL is a Danish organisation for patients with functional disorders. They are obviously enthusiastic about Denmark's venture on functional disorders.

They have just interviewed psychiatrist and researcher Andreas Schröder who has been prominent in paving the way for the functional disorder approach in Denmark. After having worked with this for 20 years, he is now leaving the field.

The interview has two parts. The first is about his research, in the second part he is asked some critical questions.

Here' an auto translated quote from part 2 and the links:

“Maybe we weren't always gentle enough – that could be – but objectively I don't know,” he answers.

Andreas then turns his attention to his own development as a doctor:

“I’ve moved on a lot,” he explains. “In my younger days, I probably believed more in the book than in the patient – a typical medical arrogance. Today, I feel that if the patient says something that doesn’t match the literature, it shouldn’t be ignored – it should be taken seriously, and perhaps that should apply to the entire field. That’s my approach.”



Part 1
PFFL Forsker i funktionel lidelse gør status efter 20 år
google translation Functional disorder researchers takes stock after 20 years


Part 2
Begik lægerne fejl? Fem skarpe spørgsmål til psykiateren
google translation Did the doctors make mistakes? Five critical questions for the psychiatrist

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

The interview has two parts. The first is about his research, in the second part he is asked some critical questions.

He sounds a bit like Simon Wessely. Went in like a bull in a china shop. Discovered that the superglue did not stick the bits together for very long. Slipped out the back door.

 

[Chandelier]

Andreas then turns his attention to his own development as a doctor:

“I’ve moved on a lot,” he explains. “In my younger days, I probably believed more in the book than in the patient – a typical medical arrogance. Today, I feel that if the patient says something that doesn’t match the literature, it shouldn’t be ignored – it should be taken seriously, and perhaps that should apply to the entire field. That’s my approach.”

@cstruter

 

[ME/CFS Science Blog]

Thanks for sharing this. The interview is quite interesting.

Here's the link to the RCT on ACT Schroder did but which found null results:
Acceptance and Commitment group Therapy for patients with multiple functional somatic syndromes: a three-armed trial comparing ACT in a brief and extended version with enhanced care | Psychological Medicine | Cambridge Core

 

[ME/CFS Science Blog]

“Maybe we weren't always gentle enough – that could be – but objectively I don't know,” he answers.

This reminds me of statements by Elise van De Putte who helped pioneer the FINET treatment in children with CFS. A couple of years ago she stated:

She already knew back then that it doesn’t help to tell children with chronic fatigue to get off the couch—“You’re not sick; you can go to school”—and instead focused entirely on behavioral therapy: learning to think differently about what you feel and what your body can handle. Learning to act differently. And now, twenty years later, Elise van de Putte knows that even that doesn’t help in 30 to 40 percent of cases. “I see girls from back then who never got better. They think it’s their own fault, because I had told them they could contribute to the solution themselves, hadn’t I?” Yes, she feels terrible about that. She thinks she may have just made those girls even unhappier.

Source is this 2023 article: Kinderarts Elise van de Putte: ‘Kinderen worden geweldig onder druk gezet’ - NRC

 

[Rick Sanchez]

What an absolute clown interview. Guy talks about how hard it was that ACT didn`t actually turn out to work. Then the psyop bogus patient association adds this afterwards:

ACT is a form of therapy still being used today.

Like, what`s going on. The patient association can`t even see how bad this makes their cause look!!

Andreas even adds that some patients became significantly worse after ACT.

"It was hard to have offered and tested a new form of treatment that didn’t actually help the patients—where only a few improved, and some got significantly worse! We had become overly enthusiastic about how quickly and effectively treatment could be delivered. All in all, the treatment was too challenging for many."

Yet he didn`t even bother to suggest that the Danish Health Authority stop recommending that Danish MECFS patients be treated with GET after becoming aware of this. When one would have to assume that GET would lead to more adverse effects than ACT.

»De latterliggør dig og fremstiller dig som en læge, der hader patienterne«

Det kan være særdeles heftigt at arbejde i et så konfliktfyldt område som kronisk træthed. Psykiater Andreas Schröder har selv oplevet at blive hængt ud på nettet og blive offentligt udskammet. Alligevel bliver han ved – og efter at være gået ned med stress og depression er han blevet mere...

ugeskriftet.dk

From the above article, which is linked in article discussed, from 2020

Although Andreas Schröder had taken great care to be overly cautious in the ME debate, he personally experienced the unpleasant sting of the harsh international tone of the debate in December 2016.

He was attending a conference in Australia when colleagues drew his attention to a scientific blog post by a Dutch professor on PLoS Blogs. In addition to the blog post, there was—in Andreas Schröder’s words—"misleading criticism" of the article in a comments section on PubMed. At the same time, he saw a YouTube video in which the professor disparaged his research, bluntly dismissing it as "garbage."

I experienced what it is like to be publicly shamed online and have to read misleading and outright false claims about my research.

I mean. If you admit now that some of your research was bad and harmed patients... The criticism was... eh.. justified? As in not misleading, and not making false claims

Wallows in self-pity. Quits scientific research. Good riddance. Bye bye Andreas Schröder.

 

[rvallee]

“I’ve moved on a lot,” he explains. “In my younger days, I probably believed more in the book than in the patient – a typical medical arrogance. Today, I feel that if the patient says something that doesn’t match the literature, it shouldn’t be ignored – it should be taken seriously, and perhaps that should apply to the entire field. That’s my approach.”

Self-serving bullshit typical of these types. Too late for that, buddy. You don't get involved creating a system of mindless cruelty that destroys more lives than most wars and starting waxing poetic about it once you retire.

There has been exactly zero change in how this ideology operates, and this self-serving fake apology means less than nothing. Not when their machine of misery and death is causing more misery and death than ever.

Still the blame for this lies higher up the chain. All of this was approved, beyond what was reasonable, and this is why it's still plowing through millions of lives like we're nothing to them. All they ever think about is what it means for them, and some seem to be thinking about the possibility of future litigation, and damnatio memoria, but the die is cast. You don't cross the Rubicon millions of times over, back and forth, smothering your asses in it, then pretend it might have been some sort of mistakes. What a bunch of weak, whiny babies.

 

[rvallee]

Part 2
Begik lægerne fejl? Fem skarpe spørgsmål til psykiateren
google translation Did the doctors make mistakes? Five critical questions for the psychiatrist

Softball interview with generic questions and even more generic non-answers. These people have nothing but a legacy of misery and destruction. They never actually thought about any part of this, they just went in with their bad ideas and are still as intransigent as ever.

 

[Kalliope]

You don't cross the Rubicon millions of times over, back and forth, smothering your asses in it, then pretend it might have been some sort of mistakes.

thanks for a steady supply of chuckles!

 

[Liii]

Then the psyop bogus patient association

We probably shouldn't bash any patient organisation too much in almost any situation. But it would be very interesting to have more information about what kind of organisation this is. There is a little more information up-thread.

 

[Rick Sanchez]

We probably shouldn't bash any patient organisation too much in almost any situation.

This organisation is a borderline propaganda outlet for the ´funktionelle lidelser` researchers in Denmark. They constantly get negative comments on their Facebook page from Danish MECFS patients. When the org started Danish MECFS patients were incredulous. Who started this? Why? What connection do they have to researchers at Aarhus like Fink? Why was the org started in the middle of a lot of MECFS drama with regards to whether MECFS should be recognised as a distinct illness?

If anything, in my humble opinion, this organisation is the perfect example of why hostility to some patient organisations is entirely warranted.

But it would be very interesting to have more information about what kind of organisation this is. There is a little more information up-thread.

You can see the comments made by Danish MECFS patients on FB below and translate them if curious



However in my view, any kind of deep dive into this organisation is a complete waste of time at this point. Andreas retiring from research, and this defeatist interview shows that victory is at hand. Just isn`t worth it to waste any more time on this functional disorder nonsense. research within the next decade will deliver the killing blow to this farce. Truth be told, I´m mainly here in the thread to gloat. For me it`s personal.

 

[Utsikt]

We probably shouldn't bash any patient organisation too much in almost any situation. But it would be very interesting to have more information about what kind of organisation this is. There is a little more information up-thread.

Anyone can call themselves a patient organisation and stil do harm. Should be go soft on Recovery Norway? What about the people that believe some snake oil cured their cancer and keep recommending it to others? They are actively contributing towards harm done to others. Yes, they were conned and abused by people that have a duty to do better, but that is no reason to accept their harmful behaviour.

 

[Liii]

This organisation is a borderline propaganda outlet for the ´funktionelle lidelser` researchers in Denmark.

I agree with you this this organisation seems really suspect. But as long as we don't KNOW there isn't least some poor functional-motor-disorder people who feel that they really are helped by psychotherapy who run the organisation, I think it's best to criticise them in a more neutral tone, and abstain for the (justified) condensation that we usually show BPS institutions.

They should not pretend to represent the majority of people with ME/CFS, or course.

Should we go soft on Recovery Norway?

I think it is clear that Recovery Norway is altogether corrupt. Is it really clear that this Danish organisation is as bad?