Guardian Article on Mark Cavendish recovering from Epstein Barr

hellytheelephant

hellytheelephant

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Just to clarify, the article is in the Observer, which is published on the guardian website but is a different paper with different editors to the Guardian.

I thought it was a really good interview – and a welcome antidote to the usual cliches we so often hear from sports stars about how their triumph over adversity proves that can you can achieve anything if you put your mind to it and believe in yourselves. By contrast, Cavendish recognises that he was lucky, despite being given bad advice by doctors, and now he is just seems to be grateful that he is able to do what he loves doing – riding his bike and winning races.

“‘The process of coming back, from not being able to walk to the bathroom, not being able to climb stairs, to going back to the Tour de France: everything leading up to this year makes a mountain stage piss easy, I tell you,’he says with a chuckle. ‘You learn what actual suffering is.’”

I’ve often thought that if I could have had my illness for a year or so and made a full recovery it could have been a blessing because I would have appreciated life so much more than I ever could have before. I actually cried reading the article, thinking of Cavendish’s comeback (which I’ve followed closely as a cycling fan) and imagining the joy I might have known if this bastard illness hadn’t destroyed my life.
 
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I don’t like his use of language “EBV is a coward illness, it comes when you are stressed or rundown” It is a very common viral illness and can happen when you are not stressed and in “good health”. People/Society have to attribute something else to causation of EBV or post viral syndromes that I think needs to be challenged, this is part of BPS thinking.
 
hibiscuswahine said:
I don’t like his use of language “EBV is a coward illness, it comes when you are stressed or rundown” It is a very common viral illness and can happen when you are not stressed and in “good health”. People/Society have to attribute something else to causation of EBV or post viral syndromes that I think needs to be challenged, this is part of BPS thinking.
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I think that is misunderstanding what he is saying. He is not saying the afflicted person is cowardly for having caught the virus. He is using slightly colourful language to describe the illness itself, given it attacks people when they are already low. But I can see how it might easily be misconstrued.

ETA: Or did I misunderstand what you were meaning @hibiscuswahine?
 
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The underlying belief of BPS which is entrenched in most of our society and some cultures that when we are stressed or physically rundown we catch viruses.

It negates that people get viruses all the time whether they are stressed or not and depends on immune’s system’s ability to recognise the virus and eliminate it (and if you have a “normal” immune system or adequate nutrition/physical health to fight it)

The psychosomatic school when looking for a reason for PVF (and ME) looked at stressful life events at the time and then claimed this association is a more relevant contributory factor than to viral biological effects. They looked further into the history of life events in a big cohort and found some correlation (not strong) then the incidence of past anxiety and depressive disorders (not strong) then proceeded to try to ascertain defects in personality functioning etc. (picking at straws by this time). Then they came up with their BPS model and treatment. This thinking then started to pervade society’s construct of the illness through the 80’s and 90’s.

Problem is people are having stressful life events all the time. It’s not a specific causation.

They never accepted that EBV, a very common virus that roughly 90% of the population have in our lifetime has a different illness trajectory in some people and is not a psychological defect.
 
Sorry to make a little diversion from the subject but, speaking of the BPS belief ...

Last week I had a conversation with the syndic of the Order of Psychologists in my Province (CA). I wanted to know the exact limit on the field of competence of their members. I asked him 2 specific questions.

The first one : can a psychologist claim that psychotherapy can cure a physical illness? He clearly replied no and that if I witnessed such an assertion from a member, I had to report it to the syndic of the Order (which I already knew). (The syndic deals with complaints from the public concerning a member and decides, after investigation, whether this complaint should be brought to the disciplinary committee of the Order, in accordance with the professional code and ethics.)


The second one, and this was where the going got tough: can a psychologist claim that psychotherapy can reduce symptoms of physical illness? He answered yes... Oh Lord ... I then asked him what evidence he was basing himself on to say this, arguing that to my humble knowledge no evidence of cause and effect really existed, at least for the majority. There, it seemed to me to search for his words for a few seconds. He then explained to me that psychotherapy could "reduce the impact of stress on illness " and ended up referring to Hans Selye *, the father of the concept of stress. With each additional question I asked him to question his assertion, he kept repeating the same sentence to me "psychotherapy can reduce the impact of stress on the disease ". I then said to him, "Maybe psychotherapy can reduce stress through relaxation or help the person cope with the disease, however, how can you be sure that stress can reduce the extent of cancer, for example? See, I think you keep repeating that same very general sentence to me because the direct cause-and-effect connection is not proven. There he whispered a little "yes" !! (that it was true.)

Although I remained calm and cordial throughout the conversation, I believe he was glad that I ended the call.

*https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5915631/
 
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Lilas said:
"Maybe psychotherapy can reduce stress through relaxation or help the person cope with the disease, however, how can you be sure that stress can reduce the extent of cancer, for example? See, I think you keep repeating that same very general sentence to me because the direct cause-and-effect connection is not proven. There he whispered a little "yes" !! (that it was true.)
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Yes, and this is the problem. They get a bit confused about the limitations of their therapy and believe everything is rooted in psychological models. Part of my training in psychiatry was in brief and long psychodynamic therapy (and CBT and newer therapies like MBSR.) It is encouraged that we have psychotherapy to make us better psychiatrists/therapists as our therapeutic relationships are equally as important as medication. I paid for two years of psychotherapy, it did not change the core components of my ME or my gradual deterioration but made me more insightful of myself.
 
Back to the article... I think it was good. I'm not going to nitpick it, and I think there are some really good key quotes from Cavendish that show an insight that many others have failed to gain, such as:

“Some people never get better,” he says matter of factly.
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“I was told I was medically all right to train again,” he says. “And I wasn’t. I still had Epstein-Barr in my system and the only thing that’s proven to help is rest, pure rest.
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I wonder who/where he was getting medical advice from, and what they recommended to him. (Someone with elite level fitness and probably a lot of disposable income.)

I am happy that he made a recovery, and hopefully he won't relapse.

However, I will also note that this article could have basically been written about me in my early years of illness: (with the exception of the whole "famous" thing)

I was extremely athletic and had just returned from cycling 3000 miles through Central America when I initially fell ill. Well, I had been feeling "off" for a while, but had just brushed it off and ignored it.

I was housebound for a year or so but eventually started recovering my function. I started training again, and even got back to bike racing. Lance Armstrong was one of my idols at the time (before his ultimate fall from grace), and I would think about a passage from his book where he was coming back to riding after cancer, getting passed by septuagenarians as he climbed a hill.

I eventually got back to an impressive level of fitness, but there was still something about my health that bugged me. I still felt "off", and slept too much, and felt abnormally drowsy when I wasn't exercising.

A couple years later I fully relapsed. This cycle actually repeated a couple more times before I got to the point where I am today.

I'm not sure what the point is of this story, since I realize that this is far from typical for ME/CFS. Maybe the point is that for athletes, it can be even harder to recognize the signs and symptoms. Someone says "well you just biked 50km, so you can't have CFS!" But what if you normally ride 200km?
 
chrisb said:
I don't know who it was who brought him down, but he should be suspended for a long time.
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Chris, it sounds like the crash occurred in an indoors track but regardless whether it is indoors or outdoors, cycling involves a risk of crashes due to the proximity of riders. One small mistake, one bump on the road, one moment of inattention can lead to massive crashes which send cyclists behind flying left and right.
 
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This was a hugely reckless move which can be seen on the Daily Mail website. Accidents happen all the time, but there are differences of degree.
 
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