Michael Sharpe: Mind, Medicine and Morals: A Tale of Two Illnesses (2019) BMJ blog - and published responses

We propose that this is not through a failure of goodwill on anybody’s part

That seems a bit of a turnaround for someone who has been accusing patients of failure of goodwill and in the process showing the failure of their own goodwill.

 

That's the thing with liars: unless there are consequences to lying, they just keep on lying and lying. When others are party to the lies, by publishing them or repeating them, then they become attached to those lies as acknowledging them would now impact them personally.

Sharpe still repeats the lie that the only opposition is from butthurt patients and nobody else, and on petty grounds rather than the garbage quality of his research. This is an easy disprovable lie, yet no one who publishes his drivel is bothered to check, or even do something about it when repeatedly slapped in the face with it.

It's all politics. Once you've "otherized" a population, certified that they are not deserving of normal rights and protections (and goodwill, while we're at it), then anything goes, even ethics and morality. People will keep on dying and millions will continue to suffer needlessly because of Sharpe and his colleagues' work and nobody cares who isn't affected or already knows about the facts. Because the lies have become reality and reality has become one with the lies.

 

It's nearly a century old. What time scale are they using? Geological? Phrenology was contemporary to the early days of the psychosocial model. Just because they prepended the bio part as a rebranding exercise does not change that it's a purely psychosomatic model built entirely on the same muddled logical fallacies as in its early days.

What else do they consider a new approach? Electricity? The steam engine? The germ theory of disease? Aqueducts?!

 

The last thing I tweeted to Wessely before he blocked me is that him and his school of thought are responsible for fully half of the suffering that we experience.

I am being generous with this, it's way more than half. But it is at least fully half. Over time it gets closer and closer to all of it, as properly funded research would have likely already have made a significant impact. They created and perpetuate enormous suffering and are not bothered with correcting it, even fight against their victims when we beg for mercy. In my book that makes them monsters and I think they will be understood as such with time.

So on the matter of morals, this is the immoral ones calling their victims bad for resisting the nightmare they created. What truly horrible people.

 

I absolutely call it a failure of goodwill. I think many others would do as well. He is just saying things he wants to be true, not things that actually are true. He also knows very well that many have blamed the failure of goodwill. As usual, Sharpe rejects reality and substitutes his own.

 

Relative to what?

 

This

 

The BMJs justification for this piece of diatribe is that they don't shy away from debate. Are they therefore offering up the right of reply to an opponent of Sharpe et al in the form of a full article response?

How about Carolyn Wilshire and Jonathan Edwards?

Or is the debate just going to be about censoring comments from patients?

 

Relative to the person's subjective recall of the past 2 weeks of experiencing fatigue.

 

Sort of compounded subjectivity. Subjective assessment of how their subjective fatigue ratings varied over the two weeks.

 

Comments on the original post were all censored. No commentary was published along.

This was no debate, it was once more the irresponsible and uncritical airing of personal grievances by a delusional immoral man detached from reality and showing reckless disregard for the millions of lives he harmed.

This qualifies more as bullying than as a legitimate debate.

 

I didn't expect them to publish commentaries at the same time as publishing this paper. I'd assumed that they'd put submitted commentaries through some sort of review process which would take sometime.

 

Apologies for just popping in, but when I saw this tweet I thought maybe Dorothy Bishop wanted to write a commentary?

https://twitter.com/user/status/1140152975450615808


edited to add link: "Science has a problem. Here is how you can help..." http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/03/science-has-problem-here-is-how-you-can.html

 

https://bmj.altmetric.com/details/62366783/twitter

So far, Altmetric has seen 1 Reddit thread.

So far, Altmetric has seen 109 tweets from 80 users (lists all Twitter accounts that have posted).


The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 80 tweeters who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.

Demographic breakdown
Type Count As %

Members of the public 68 85%
Scientists 4 5%
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals) 4 5%
Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors) 4 5%


Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
United Kingdom 21 26%
United States 5 6%
Australia 4 5%
Germany 3 4%
Ireland 3 4%
Norway 2 3%
Belgium 1 1%
Sweden 1 1%
Netherlands 1 1%

 

"Medical Humanities is an official journal of the Institute of Medical Ethics."

Gawd help us!

The other open access commentaries, editorials and original research papers listed with the Sharpe & Greco piece as "Latest Articles" have received between 4 and 1 postings on Twitter.

 

Is it feasible someone (or two, a few) from our side could present an article for publication? Something much more rational and to the point of course.