Jonathan Edwards
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
IV saline is most likely given specifically to help POTS symptoms and increasing blood volume, so wouldn't that be a very plausible treatment rationale, given that saline directly increases blood volume?
We have discussed this before but the answer I think is no because saline given IV will be passed out in the urine within 20 minutes just the same as saline drunk by mouth. There is absolutely no credible reason for giving saline IV as far as I can see as someone trained in clinical physiology.
For some reason, almost every ME/CFS child patient reported in the news here in Finland seems to have co-morbid diagnoses of POTS, EDS, PANS, etc.
I suspect the reason is that private practitioners have been offering these diagnoses to patients. I am increasingly confident that there is no association between EDS and ME and that EDS is grossly over diagnosed. I do not know what PANS is.
If I was responsible for regulating medical care I would remove licenses from anyone using IV saline or oxygen for children with ME. That would partly be because the treatment was not justified by evidence, But it would also be partly for the reason I mentioned - that this sort of bogus teatment based on bogus diagnosis is acting as a trigger for health professionals concluding that parents are exposing their children to treatments that they should not be having. If I heard of children having thee treatments I would find it very difficult not to think that I had a responsibility to intervene. If children are exposed to things like this for no good reason there has to be a worry that more dangerous things may be tried. GET may be just as dangerous but that is not the point I am making - use of GET does not give rise to claims of FII and removal of children into care.