News from Finland

Moved from the Long covid in the media thread.

This one by the Finnish government's expert group on long covid was published in January 2022, but I don't think it has been posted on here yet?

Expertgrupp: Långvariga symptom efter covid-19 kan förekomma hos ungefär varannan vuxen – vaccinerna minskar risken och lindrar symptomen
https://valtioneuvosto.fi/sv/-/1271...ccinerna-minskar-risken-och-lindrar-symptomen

Google Translate, English

 

MillionsMissing Finland on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/millionsmissingfinland/

and on Twitter

https://twitter.com/FinlandMissing

 

News from 23 February 2021: The very first Finnish consensus guidelines for diagnosis and treatment of ME, published by Duodecim.

Terveysportti: Krooninen väsymysoireyhtymä (ME/CFS) Hyvä käytäntö -konsensussuositus
https://www.terveysportti.fi/apps/ltk/article/hsu00019?toc=476592

 

News article from May 2021, about Helsinki University Hospital's (HUS) clinic for functional disorders (opened in May 2019).

"Det är inget annat än hjärntvätt" – HUS förespråkar kontroversiell vård till patienter, också postcovidpatienter har hänvisats till samma klinik
https://svenska.yle.fi/a/7-1531562

Google Translate, English

An earlier article about the same, published in February 2020:
HUS-poliklinik i kritikstorm – läkarna rekommenderar bland annat kurs som fått varning av Tukes
https://svenska.yle.fi/a/7-1447636

More info about the clinic, headed by senior physician Helena Liira, and their ongoing research projects:

Polikliniken för funktionella tillstånd, Böle ("The policlinic for functional disorders")
https://www.hus.fi/sv/for-patienten...eter/polikliniken-funktionella-tillstand-bole

Behandling av funktionella tillstånd ("Treatments for functional disorders")
https://www.hus.fi/sv/behandlingar-och-undersokningar/behandling-av-funktionella-tillstand

I apologise for linking to articles in Swedish instead of Finnish. It's only because my Finnish is very poor, I mean no offense.

(Edited to change "Helsingfors" to "Helsinki". Sorry!)

 

So nice to see a Finland thread
I visited once and would love to go back sometime.

Only know "Hyvää päivää", which means good day.

Looking forward to learn more about ME and Finland in this thread.

 

I only know the words that are similar in Finnish and Hungarian (both are Uralic languages), like vér/veri (blood), száz/sata (hundred), kéz/käsi (hand), hal/kala (fish), menni/mennä (to go) etc.

My family name is Szarvas, which means "deer" the animal, but the literal translation is something like: "[something] with horns" or "horned". And in Finnish horn is "sarvi" (in Hungarian it is szarv).

And there is a sentence I know that is similar in both:

• Elävä kala uiskentelee veden alla.
• Eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt.

Meaning "a live fish is swimming under water".

But the split between these languages happened several thousand years ago and they became so very different over time that until just a few hundred years ago (when modern linguistics was born), Hungarians were convinced they were some kind of Turks, related to the Huns, etc. They had absolutely no idea they actually spoke a Finno-Ugric language.

 

The Finnish language is amazing

 

I wouldn't have been able to recognise any of those words

How interesting that Finnish and Hungarian are similar, didn't know that.

 

The funny thing is that Finnish, Hungarian (and also Estonian) belong to a language family that is unrelated to the rest of the European languages. Everyone else belongs to the Indo-European language family (English, Russian, Greek, Italian, etc, all of them) and even languages outside Europe (Persian, Hindi). It is a huge language family with many different subgroups. But there are actually two different, unrelated language families in Europe, it is just that the Uralic one is really small. So a lot of people don't know about it.

 

This is from October 2019. MillionsMissing Finland wrote on Facebook:

"Finnish children with M.E. have increasingly started to be taken into care by the state against their own and parents will.

Yesterday Iltalehti -newspaper reported on a 15-year old M.E. patient, Petteri, who was taken from his parents by social workers accompanied with police patrol.

https://www.iltalehti.fi/kotimaa/a/0181a2f6-f16b-47e7-9003-a940b344fec2

This Friday 15 year old M.E. patient, Sanni was taken into care against her and her mother’s will.

There are other cases too and multiple families with children with M.E. in Finland are in under a threat to loose their child. Families struggle to protect their children`s appropriate treatment for M.E. on private sector and secure their wellbeing in safe home environment to handle the extremely difficult disease that requires for example absolute silence and darkened room. Those families that are financially able to, hire lawyers.

PETTERI

One morning on a scheduled visitation social workers appeared at the door of Petteri’s home surprisingly accompanied with police patrol. Petteri was taken into care without warning and is now been placed in a child welfare institution. Petteri is not treated there according to his illness.

Petteri`s parents are been accused of neglecting their child`s physical and mental care. Doctors have stated that as the test results don`t show any physical explanation to Petteri`s symptoms and condition, the reason has to be psychosomatic and they have interpreted that Petteri`s symptoms worsen specially in presence of his mother.

The child care officials have gone even further with their obscure theories without any medical knowledge about M.E. blaming Petteri`s condition to be caused by a video game addiction that keeps him up at nights. Petteri’s mother objects telling Petteri’s condition allows Petteri to play video games and watch Netflix only on rare occasions.

Petteri got ill with M.E. in 2017 and was diagnosed with M.E. by HUS, Helsinki University Hospital in 2018. Due to M.E. Petteri could not attend school and a teacher was visiting Petteri at his home once a week.

Petteri has been now in a child welfare institution for multiple weeks and first the family was allowed to visit him daily. But now the visitations have been limited to twice a week as the officials blame that Petteri`s mother`s "worry behavior" causes worsening of Petteri`s condition.

Petteri`s family has a lawyer working on getting Petteri back to his loving family.

SANNI

Last Friday child protection authorities in Tampere made an urgent decision to place 15 year old M.E. patient, Sanni, into care against her and her mother`s will.

Tampere University Hospital (TAYS) Neurologist decided to hospitalize Sanni over the weekend, where she is right now. Her condition has worsen since.

Child protection authorities are planning to transfer Sanni into a children`s home tomorrow, on Monday. They list as reasons for this extreme caution the treatments Sanni receives from the private health care sector: oxygen treatment, saline iv and low dose naltroxen.

Sanni doesn`t receive any treatments for M.E. from the public health care sector. Her mother does her best for her child`s wellbeing and pays for treatments on private sector that are commonly used for M.E. internationally.

Sanni dreams on getting better and going back to school.

Placing Sanni in children`s home would danger her growth, development and safety.

A demonstration has been organized to save Sanni, it takes place tomorrow at TAYS-hospital 2pm."

 

There is a theory that maybe those two language families did share a common ancestor a very very long time ago but it is really difficult to tell now. However, it is not widely accepted.

One important thing is that it is not enough to find similar words in two languages. One can find similar sounding words in Danish and Arabic, Greek and Mayan languages etc etc without them having a common origin because some words with the same meaning will be inherently similar by chance. What is important to look for is patterns: do similar words have a tendency to follow the same patterns when they change in these languages? For example words starting with p in Finnish tend to start with f in Hungarian. Words starting with k in Finnish often start with h in Hungarian. Etc etc there are many of these and the more patterns there are, the strongest the connection is I guess.

Also, it is the oldest, most basic words that share the same origin: words for body parts, numbers, words in connection with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, basic verbs.

You can also actually more or less follow the route of the Hungarians from the Ural Mountains based on the language and when what kind of new words entered the language. You can look at the names for different trees (and what language they come from) to see where the population must have been at that time geographically. The same is true for culture: all the Uralic words are related to hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Then the Hungarians met Iranian people (not the Persians but related ones), so they adopted words in connection with weaponry etc they didn't have before. Also the word for "thousand" (ezer) is of Iranian origin which must have been a new concept to them at that time. Later they became equestrian nomads, mixed a lot with and adopted the culture, music, social structure etc of Turkic equestrian nomadic tribes and also many new words arrived with this interaction relating to those (and that is why they were convinced they were one of them). Again, when they arrived at the current territory of Hungary and settled down, they met Slavs and adopted a lot of their words relating to agriculture.

So you can basically follow history and how the language evolved and what happened when. This is of course also true for other languages but in this case this is mostly what they had to rely on to figure out the origins.

 

Moved post

 

Far more worrying is that Avi Nath is participating in this quack fest. WTH?!

 

Gerd Kvale is also speaking. She is behind a 4 day intervention for anxiety and OCD which had good results in clinical trials. Now there's a clinic in Norway - Helse in Hardanger - based on this approach to other diagnoses as diabetes, chronic back pain, fatigue, long covid etc. One of the doctors there is also the deputy of Recovery Norge.

 

Makes perfect sense. In the same line of thinking one could apply hemorrhoid creme to insomniacs cause if it soothes my bum it must soothe everything else too.