News from Scandinavia

[rvallee]

sciencenorway.no Researchers: Not testing for Covid-19 is creating problems

I'm trying to come up with anything that makes this different from what the tobacco industry did and aside from the fact that it's far worse coming from experts in a position of authority... and I can't. This is what the tobacco industry did. They're even pretty much promoting the idea that regular infections are good. They go smoothly down the throat.

Maybe not so much a great filter but rather a bunch of small filters. Same outcome. At this point I'm pretty sure the odds of us surviving ourselves without AI essentially taking the reins from us seem almost laughable.

 

[Ravn]

Opinion piece in Sundhedspolitisk Tidsskrift:

ME-foreningen: Sundhedsstyrelsens direktør vildleder Folketinget
ME Association: The Director of the Danish Health Authority Misleads Parliament

Norway, Sweden and NICE all get dragged into this Danish nightmare

In this opinion piece, sharp criticism is directed at the Danish Health Authority's presentation on ME/CFS, which was presented at a thematic meeting in the Ministry of Health for Parliament's health spokespersons. According to Erica N. Church, chair of the ME Association, and Vibeke Vind, M.Sc. in biochemistry and member of the ME Association's ME Advisory Board, the presentation provides a distorted and professionally inadequate basis for decision-making, which risks having serious consequences for patient safety.

Examples taken from the presentation of stigmatizing and loaded language, as well as tactics such as strawman arguments, cherry-picking, and sensationalism:
Quote: "History of personal harassment and public shaming on social media" (understood to mean that ME patients and their relatives harass employees who work with ME, ed.).”

This sentence was shown during the knowledge review, which is completely irrelevant. It is an unnecessarily stigmatizing piece of information that shifts focus and sympathy from a vulnerable patient group to the Danish Health Authority's employees. This feeds directly into Brian Heron's opinion piece in the Health Policy Journal about power and responsibility in healthcare communication.

Quotes:
- "Two meetings with former NICE employees, who report about a very difficult guideline to execute"
- "Working group members emigrated"
- "Death threats from the English ME association"
- "Methodologically, GRADE has not been applied in the classical sense, but more weight has been placed on qualitative knowledge and the English ME association's opinions about the disease."

These four points together are deeply problematic. Speculation and sensationalism are used as tools to sow doubt about NICE's credibility on false grounds. Furthermore, the English ME association is portrayed as threatening and opinion-based.

 

[Sean]

Denmark. That would be the home of the unrepentant Per Fink. Yes?

––––––––––

Danish patients, and the ME Association, should demand full transparency and evidence for these outrageous defamatory claims, and full right of reply.

Quotes:
- "Two meetings with former NICE employees, who report about a very difficult guideline to execute"
- "Working group members emigrated"
- "Death threats from the English ME association"
- "Methodologically, GRADE has not been applied in the classical sense, but more weight has been placed on qualitative knowledge and the English ME association's opinions about the disease."

 

[Kalliope]

Comment in Sundhedspolitisk Tidsskrift: When Criticism Is Made Suspicious – About Power and Responsibility in Healthcare Communication

The author explains why he formally complained to the Aarhus Functional Disorders Centre

Per Fink has written a response presenting his centre as rational, respectful and up to date on knowledge and competence:

Om debatklima, faglighed og behandling af funktionelle lidelser

Sundhedspolitisk Tidsskrift giver dig nyheder om sundhedspolitik, nye behandlinger, sundhedsøkonomi samt debat om sundhedsproblemer og -politik

sundhedspolitisktidsskrift.dk

 

[Kalliope]

Professor Wyller has received 25 million NOK (2 222 457 EUR/ 2 620 900 USD) for research into Mind Body Reprocessing Therapy as treatment of chronic fatigue. According to this article from Akershus University Hospital, chronic fatigue can follow from several conditions, including autoimmune illnesses as inflammatory bowel syndrome, infections as Covid-19 and cancer.

Wyller says the method is a mental training programme related to CBT and that it has shown promise so far.

He says the treatment is easy and cheap and - if successful - will be very useful for all patients with chronic fatigue. It's also a treatment which is very easy to start using in rehabilitation.

Stor tildeling til forskning rundt blodforgiftning og langvarig utmattelse

Hvilken type antibiotika er best ved mistanke om blodforgiftning, og hvem kan ha nytte av metoden MBRT etter utmattelse? Det er tema for to Ahus-koordinerte prosjekter som til sammen får over 49 millioner kroner i forskningsstøtte.

www.ahus.no

 

[Chandelier]

According to this article from Akershus University Hospital, chronic fatigue can follow from several conditions, including autoimmune illnesses as inflammatory bowel syndrome, infections as Covid-19 and cancer.

Is this also about ME/CFS or only about "chronic fatigue"? Are they aware of the difference?

 

[Kalliope]

Is this also about ME/CFS or only about "chronic fatigue"? Are they aware of the difference?

I haven't seen any presentation of the trial, but am pretty sure Wyller would include ME/CFS in chronic fatigue, yes. The precise translation is not even "chronic fatigue", but "long term fatigue". I'm sure that's to "offer hope" of recovery.

 

[Utsikt]

MBRT is the treatment used in MINIRICO.

It’s based on assuming the patients are healthy, predictive coding, etc.

 

[rainy]

It is always about how wonderful it is that it's "easy and cheap" (I assume it's a key requirement to get research funding). Effective isn't important, just cheap.

I just watched a video from a silly norwegian insomnia trial and they went on and on about how it's very cheap, very easy to implement, everyone enjoys doing it very much, the physio's only need a few hours of training to do it.

Now, the trial didn't show that it improved sleep duration, but it was definitely effective for some mysterious subjective sleep quality, and that was very lovely since they had already been treating hundreds of patients with it before there ever was a trial. And now that it's proven so effective, they can convince even more people to try their cheap and easy insomnia program that doesn't help you sleep more.

 

[Sean]

Wyller says the method is a mental training programme related to CBT and that it has shown promise so far.

He says the treatment is easy and cheap and - if successful

How many attempts at proving their obsession are they going to be allowed before the rest of the world accepts they have not delivered, and are never going to?

This stuff was 'promising' 40 years ago, and still is. They have made exactly zero progress in delivering meaningful benefits for patients in that time.

 

[rvallee]

It is always about how wonderful it is that it's "easy and cheap" (I assume it's a key requirement to get research funding). Effective isn't important, just cheap.

I just watched a video from a silly norwegian insomnia trial and they went on and on about how it's very cheap, very easy to implement, everyone enjoys doing it very much, the physio's only need a few hours of training to do it.

Now, the trial didn't show that it improved sleep duration, but it was definitely effective for some mysterious subjective sleep quality, and that was very lovely since they had already been treating hundreds of patients with it before there ever was a trial. And now that it's proven so effective, they can convince even more people to try their cheap and easy insomnia program that doesn't help you sleep more.

This has really been the main method for this whole scam. They simply go ahead and implement it ASAP, then it becomes embarrassing to stop because it would confirm the waste of resources and no one wants to admit to that. And they can get away with it because it's useless at best, so there is no reason not to wait for results, especially as they're always bad anyway. Could do the same for homeopathy, it's cheap and harmless. But this is ritual magic, so it invests people even more because of the fake skills they allegedly develop, that creates human resources problems.

Then of course every variation of the same after that can be implemented ASAP since it's basically the same as the previous/current scams.

Wyller says the method is a mental training programme related to CBT

They can even just go ahead and say it. "Yeah, this is basically the same as what we've been doing for decades, but it's yellow instead of purple". So much novelty. So little of it actually new. A century war against reason, impossible to stop because, who even knows what they're fighting anymore, but it would be disrespectful to all the dead and the wasted treasury and so on.