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

C-L Psychiatry to the rescue.

However did the world manage to turn without this revolutionary innovation.

Pretty soon this CLP centre of the universe will be everywhere.

 

https://mh.bmj.com/content/early/2020/06/01/medhum-2019-011807

not yet on sci-hub

 

Sci hub link: https://sci-hub.tw/downloads-ii/2020-06-02/78/10.1136@medhum-2019-011807.pdf?download=true

 

The Faculty Lounge

https://www.thefacultylounge.org/2020/06/is-mecfs-an-illness-without-disease.html

 

A concerning display of medical indifference: reply to ‘Chronic fatigue syndrome and an illness-focused approach to care: controversy, morality and paradox’, Diane O'Leary
https://mh.bmj.com/content/early/2020/06/28/medhum-2019-011743

 

Link is tweet gives access to the full text.
https://twitter.com/user/status/1278362804664360961

 

ACLP Appoints Hochang Lee, MD, FACLP, as Psychosomatics Editor-in-Chief from January 2021

https://myemail.constantcontact.com...-2021.html?soid=1102670834514&aid=r4SJf-xEeCk

 

‘Important Moment in Disseminating the Proactive C-L Model across the Atlantic’
Paper describes a new version of Proactive C-L Psychiatry for medical inpatients with multimorbidity

https://www.clpsychiatry.org/aclp-news/y2020/m09/proactive-model/

thread on HOME study here
https://www.s4me.info/threads/the-home-study-michael-sharpe-s-cbt-for-the-elderly.2499/

 

The study with no control group ?

 

Yup. The same one with extremely perverse incentive of discharging patients quicker without any consideration for whether it's a good idea or not. It's all about money, cheapening the delivery of care to a standardized fast-food medicine. But, hey, it's "personalized" since you get a fortune cookie with a unique generic words-of-cheap-wisdom.

 

The illness-disease dichotomy and the biological-clinical splitting of medicine
Luigi Tesio ,1,2 Marco Buzzoni3

pdf
https://mh.bmj.com/content/medhum/early/2020/09/28/medhum-2020-011873.full.pdf

 

This is infuriating.

And I know exactly why they write this. It is precisely because they believe that the Sharpe / Greco paper doesn't make the case as best it could to KEEP the rehabilitative / disease modifying therapies in the mix. This is the purpose of the supposed synthesis of the two positions (Sharpe/Greco)(Wiltshire/Ward).

For example:

*they mean downstream here

As far as I am aware of the total pool of people with MS probably all of them are looking for a treatment for their symptoms and are waiting hopefully for a treatment that is curative. Of that total some sub-set (minority) may want to receive psychotherapy.

It is this constant arrogance of the people who do these kinds of treatment to elevate their approach as of equal importance / weight with patients. Just to repeat myself, they are extremely arrogant.

But there's more arrogance to come:

So patient advocacy perspectives that ask for research into cause are unfortunate. Implicitly, I presume by affecting the BPS pocketbook for future funding and not being allowed to run totally free with no oversight. Those poor people. (bps) Don't we all just feel their pain.

Should I mention as an FYI that this is my mild-mannered version? The gall of bps thinking (if one can really call it that), metaphorically it pretty much blots out the sun.

 

This philosophizing is just an attempt to give credibility to an approach that we already know has failed. Sharpe tried to make his BPS illness model work and failed.

It's a tactic to shift the debate away from objective reality and actual research findings into a purely theoretical territory where rhetoric alone can win.

 

I am confused

However, while we accept that both the experience of illness and what is usually called disease are ‘abstractions’, this is not enough. It is still necessary to raise the question of the relationship both between such abstractions and between them and the rest of reality, clarifying how abstractions thus conceived are connected, at least in principle, in an intersubjectively reproducible and testable way.

I do not understand what they mean by "reality". I thought that such reifications were better avoided.

 

I can almost guarantee that if they became seriously ill with ME they would no longer view their experience of illness as a mere abstraction. It is the privilege of the healthy to talk this kind of nonsense and impose it on others.

 

Maybe I'm weird, but I prefer scientists who have mastered object permanence.

This is just mental masturbation. I don't think anyone should pay attention to it, just self-important people who think their thoughts are just as good as real evidence, talking about things they neither understand now have experienced.