Nick Brown looks at study on sexual harassment and 'CFS'

I can't cognitively read the webpage but since sexual harassment and abuse are unfortunately common in our society many CFS patients will have this in their past.
And if you cherry pick something carefully enough you can build houses of cards. PACE was built on nonsense and believing discredited psychological nonsense then going out and proving it based on cherry picking is a form of bias.

Despite being disproved there are still many who think stress still has a role in ulcers and heart disease because they are starting from a discredited lie and building on it. Any piece that is unexplained is still blamed on stress not because they worked to it from evidence but they still refuse to let the fallacy die. An example many people have Helicobacter pylori but not all go on to get ulcers. So some have claimed its because stress caused the bacteria to create an ulcer. Gotta stick to what we know no matter how stretched it has to be made.
 
The paper was discussed on this thread at PR (with comments from many who are now S4ME members):
https://forums.phoenixrising.me/ind...sexual-harassment-predicts-me-severity.53509/

From the paper:
The patients' fatigue (β=1.38; p=0.025) and physical functioning scores (β=-1.79; p=0.034) were significantly predicted by childhood sexual harassment. There were no significant effects of emotional neglect, emotional abuse, bodily threat, or sexual abuse during childhood.
Of note, of the substantial number of types of trauma they vetted for a relationship, only sexual harassment (but not sexual abuse) was found to have a statistically significant relationship. And that, given there were no healthy controls, the study said nothing about childhood sexual harassment causing CFS; rather it suggested that childhood sexual harassment was correlated with more severe reported symptoms.

All power to Nick Brown, this was a particularly silly paper that tortured data to support the idea that childhood trauma is somehow related to CFS.

This is from Nick's blog:
(Note that only 29 of the 155 participants reported any experience of childhood sexual harassment at all. You might wonder how much of the total variance in a sample can be explained by a variable for which 80% of the participants had the same score, namely zero.)
 
This feeds into the ACE agenda that is percolating down into school/ social work/ police.
The Bath safeguarding seminar will no doubt build on this too.
Cue CBT sessions trawling for past memories and creating potential for future PTSD
 
A profoundly worrying article, I couldn't face reading it all the way through at present, will have to brace myself to face it.

However I can unambiguously say I have never experienced sexual abuse or sexual harrasment, indeed I have no recollection of any childhood traumas beyond life's normal up and downs. Perhaps all the GPs, consultants and researchers I have seen over the last twenty five years have got it wrong and I don't really have ME at all.
 
On a more serious note it is absolutely shocking the number of NHS specialist ME/CFS Services that host 'therapists' fixated on 'conversion' theories of ME that pressurise people with ME to relive as many historic traumas and stressors as possible. Presumably they do not record incidences of PEM or crashes associated with their intervention, though they might even argue such would be evidence that their approach was working.
 
On a more serious note it is absolutely shocking the number of NHS specialist ME/CFS Services that host 'therapists' fixated on 'conversion' theories of ME that pressurise people with ME to relive as many historic traumas and stressors as possible.

One should not be too surprised. I have recently been looking into some of the history. Early Wessely, David, Pelosi theories show influence by Pilowsky. He was taught by Stengel who was taught in Vienna and translated Freud, but was also a psychoanalyst. Stengel was taught by Paul Schilder who was a pupil of Freud.

I know this is rather tenuous, but is worth bearing in mind.

It is rather like the piano recitals given by X, who was taught by Y, who was taught by Z, until you get back to Liszt, who was taught by Czerny, who learned at the knee of Beethoven and before you know it you're listening to Beethoven. Or so the theory goes.
 
Great. Now I'm reading an 'excellent' blog post on beta coefficients. I hate stats. Even when I think I've got myself to understand something, two days later and I've forgotten it all anyway.

Thanks to Brown for looking into this. It's amazing how little studies like this can end up being influential when they fit into a dominant narrative.
 
Great. Now I'm reading an 'excellent' blog post on beta coefficients. I hate stats. Even when I think I've got myself to understand something, two days later and I've forgotten it all anyway.

Thanks to Brown for looking into this. It's amazing how little studies like this can end up being influential when they fit into a dominant narrative.

I didn't even try. Hehe. I got the gist, but the technical stuff went way over my head.
 
The study says:
Fatigue and physical functioning scores in CFS patients were significantly predicted by sexual harassment only.

A significant effect of emotional neglect, emotional abuse and bodily threat during childhood on elevated fatigue or reduced physical functioning levels could not be found.

Well, if the sexual harassment involved kissing, this is a means to transmit respiratory viruses, and nearly all the viruses linked to ME/CFS are respiratory viruses (can be transmitted via the respiratory route).
 
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Hmmm, the majority of kisses that children receive have nothing to do with sexual harassment...

There is a difference between cheek kissing (a common way of greeting in some European countries, though not so much in the Anglosphere) or kissing a child on the forehead say, and a deep sexual tongue kiss (a French kiss as it is called in English), which involves saliva exchange.
 
One of the points of the blog was that is was only sexual harassment, not sexual abuse:

First, there are five regression coefficients for each dependent variable, of which just one per DV has a p value below .05 (**). It's not clear to me why, in theoretical terms, childhood experiences of sexual harassment (but not emotional neglect, emotional abuse, bodily threat, or sexual abuse) should be a good predictor of fatigue (CIS) or general physical functioning (SF-36). The authors define sexual harassment as "being submitted to sexual acts without physical contact" and sexual abuse as "having undergone sexual acts involving physical contact". I'm not remotely qualified in these matters, but it seems to me that with these definitions, "sexual abuse" would probably be expected to lead to more problems in later functioning than "sexual harassment". Indeed, I find it difficult to imagine how one could be subjected to "abuse with contact" while not also being subjected to "abuse without contact", more or less by the nature of "sexual acts". (I apologise if this whole topic makes you feel uneasy. It certainly makes me feel that way.)
 
One of the points of the blog was that is was only sexual harassment, not sexual abuse:

Well that would tend to rule out my viral infection through kissing theory.

I would like to understand what they mean by sexual harassment, defined in the full paper as "being submitted to sexual acts without physical contact".

The study used the sexual harassment subscale of the Traumatic Experiences Checklist (TEC) to measure sexual harassment.
 
Actually, they do describe what they mean by sexual harassment in the paper:
The term “unwanted sexual attention” (UWSA) also describes these non-physical, sexual behaviors. Such unsolicited attention may include comments, looks, and gestures directed at an individual’s sexuality and/or appearance. Even though childhood UWSA is a nearly universal experience for girls, debates regarding the relative harm it causes continue.
 
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