Michael Sharpe skewered by @JohntheJack on Twitter

https://twitter.com/user/status/1005525651800186880

 

Is this the desired pre recorded PACE aim or something, and Sharpe has accidentally posted it online? I don't even know what he means by that tweet.

He is such a strange man.

 

This is such bollocks, either CBT and GET works because the patients have been given the wrong advice in pacing or the reverse is true and pacing works. Its fuck all to do with calling bad advice mental or physical or claiming a "psychological component".

Evidence based advice on how to manage an illness is not proof of "a psychological component".

30 years of them trying to prove CBT and GET works has failed. As treatments they are 100% based in psychology, beliefs of causation and perpetuation.

They don't work even on a claimed "psychological component".

 

Responsibility all the doctors? How clueless is this man?

Most of us have spent years, if not decades, educating our own health care teams, managing our own medications, researching, balancing all the aspects of life that get tangled in a chronic illness, managing our basic needs most take for granted--all while severely ill! Many of us alone!

He's so caught up in his own thoughts/opinions he is completely out of touch not only with the reality patients live, but the way his own bullshit has shaped the way patients can or cannot get state assistance with the social, medical, and financial burdens of long term illness.

That's just clownish, arrogant manipulation of the truth--or else complete ignorance.

 

I suspect that we should all agree with Sharpe's last quoted tweet about the implicit meaning of calling an illness "mental".

What I fail to understand is why we should feel differently if he calls it "neurasthenic" or "functional".

 

He is basically trying to advocate for "there is no mental or physical illness everything is both". Yet when it comes to treatment only psychiatry is right.

 

It's the poor doctors that need to be kept safe from patients like us that will blame the doctor for everything if it's physical. If it's "psychogenic", the patient can be blamed.

 

Argh this 'false dualism' argument is so frustrating & victim blaming - especially as it's insinuated that it comes from patients, when it actually originates with the BPS theories. Ofc there is no mind separate from body (well that's what I believe/monism), hence the way illnesses are divided into 'mental' & 'physical' is something we as a society have constructed, and which can be sometimes helpful, sometimes dangerous. ME patients push back because they are oppressed by the way the BPS crew has construed ME. And they've oppressed us precisely according to the 3 ways he say PWME moralise mental illness? ... I am genuinely baffled by this switching of reality argh!

[Note: I am not here making any comment about aetiology of ME!]

 

Using specialised meanings and then switching meaning to a new context is a common issue here. Heck they even do it with terms like harm, CBT, GET, CFS, normal, recovered, and so on.

Monism does away with all this BPS babble in one sweep, and the dualist dilemmas disappear. The problem is most psych theories rely on the dualist divide. As does BPS in how its usually used. Indeed I argue that in many cases blaming dualism without specifying monism is just another form of dualism.

So in monism there is a call for consideration of biosocial medicine, but that is it. You can drop the psych entirely. Oops, where does most of psychiatry go then?

 

His whole strategy is to keep us busy, blindsided and protect his house of cards by keeping us spinning our wheels.
This is also the political strategy of the right, and it works beautifully

So we can either fall for it and try to convince them of that which they will never concede (hence wasting our time and energy and preventing progress) or we can go after the bread and butter, skewer the real issues not their obfuscations, go after the lies they publish at the publications and where it hurts and fight for progress in the real world where funds are raised, inquiries held, court cases adjudicated, disability cases fought and doctors educated where it will make a real difference.
That is where he and the PACErs are desperate to keep us from going (their real strategy).

 

As I have said before, its about showing the issues to everyone OTHER than them. They cannot concede. What they do not understand is that without treatment or cure, without social equality, we cannot concede either. We will keep struggling for good science and social justice as long as it takes, if necessary for generation after generation.

Fortunately the science is now at the point where we know many abnormalities and know what needs to be investigated to some extent. Politically we have seen the CDC and NIH change their advice, and there is a parliamentary debate in about two weeks in UK parliament on ME. Advocacy is now much more organised, though still very fractured and with sometimes conflicting goals, but this will most likely keep improving too.

PS We are winning more and more legal battles as well.

 

You are correct but people even in this thread ask how we can convince him and why can't he understand. Engaging in good faith does nothing we should refute in good faith. A slight but powerful difference. He goes on about how PACE didn't do much, and the replies about how it did, then his denials, then more evidence, then more denials etc.
His goal is to deny reality, showing it to him is wheel spinning. Reply with the real point, its fraud, more disabled then when enrolled, COIs, people using it to justify quackery, that kind of thing.
And on the side undermine PACE in the real world. MS is small potatoes.

 

The game is a foot, or if your going by IQs a foot and a half...

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1005739795061014533


https://twitter.com/user/status/1005749866658783232


https://twitter.com/user/status/1005745626926198785

 

As with everything he writes it could be ready two different ways

1) as you suggest

2) he doesn’t agree with her assessment of the sequence of events and their motives

Grammatically though I think option 1) is the most correct...but hey it’s twitter (home of poor English) and it is Simon master of double speak

 

No. He's questioning her interpretation of the PACE authors' motives.

 

I agree, this is the key point.
PACE showed the theoretical basis for these treatments was wrong (disability was not caused by illness beliefs). And prior studies were clearly inadequate - Wessely even says his study was not even a trial - just treating some patients!