Norway - 2 comedy podcasters cause controversy by misrepresenting ME/CFS, October 2022

I’m sorry but this simply isn’t true and it doesn’t do us any service to misrepresent the current mainstream medical opinion in the US and the UK which is almost uniformly hostile to us and holds that ME/CFS is a psychological issue. I presume this patient is making an appeal to authority and alluding to the IOM report and NICE guidelines but actually these documents have had a negligible impact on routine clinical practice and as we can all see there is currently a push to simply relabel existing CBT/GET services in the UK to avoid implementing the new NICE guidelines.

 

She is talking about health authorities and not about daily clinical practice though.

 

Vogt got a reply from Sollund:

Vogt adds:

There were a few silly comments under Vogt's post.

 

I really don’t understand why Eia is on the Women’s Health Committee. It feels like when the government decided to make the national competence service for ME, only to employ people that has no competence. Or how the Norwegian prime minister has written a preface in Live Landmark’s book about LP. Or how psychology professors at universities defend and use funds on quackery. Instead of finding people with the right knowledge we put people’s health in the hands of comedians.


I saw one of their podcast episodes had the description: ‘Eia mansplains Women’s Health’, and I was hoping he would talk about the committee and maybe show that he has some knowledge about the topic. No. He talked about botox and anti-aging, because that was a hot topic in the media. There was a controversy when a new beauty clinic managed to state that they are important for the topic of women’s health, and they got a lot of critisism for misrepresenting what women’s health is actually about. Eia and his co-host did not even mention this aspect of the debate, did not even talk about the topic of women’s health at all. They took the angle that botox is creating a hightened standard of beauty for women, so Eia’s question was what sort of stand would be most sexy for him to take on the topic of anti-aging? What would be the opinion that women would find him most attractive for having?

Psychology professor Kennair (involved in the LP trial) is also on the Women’s Health Committee, and in trying to research what his knowledge on the topic is, I have so far only seen articles written by him on topics like: Why men find 21 year old women the most sexually attractive; why women have sex outside of ovulation; women want a sexy partner for themselves, but would choose a responsible partner for their sister.

I hope the Women’s Health Committee meetings aren’t just discussions on women’s dating habits and what is sexy or not.

 

In a podcast episode after Eia and Steinkopfs debate on the news, they read an email from a follower who says Eia ‘let himself be bossed around by an assertive lady with ME’.

Sagen says he has a gift for Eia, and introduces psychology professor Silje Reme as a guest. (Reme organized the recent BPS seminar about ME and is involved in the LP study).

She talks about how there is a hard debate climate about ME, how ME activists threatens researchers, tries to get research papers withdrawn, death threats, how they needed guards at the BPS seminar, how people that score high on nevroticism are more likely to get ME and there’s lots of research that shows this. She says many studies show that none of the 20 diagnosis criteria for ME are valid and that maybe it makes more sense to see fatigue as a continuum, where ME is on one extreme end of the continuum.

When Sagen asks her what she thinks of Eia’s performance on the news she says that she thinks he was passive and he needs to do better.

Sagen tells Eia that he needs to find back to himself again, to become the one that cared about the truth and saying it as it is.

Finally Eia proclaims «Why should the consideration of my career, my position, the reputation of the Women’s Health Committee, why should it count more heavily than my obligation, my damned obligation, to what is true?! For the truth sets free!»

 

Thank you for the summary, @rainy
I've not had the stomach to listen to the podcast episodes

 

Like the old days of Jeremy Kyle type things making people into a freak show it seems these ‘debates’ are the replacement version of this after those tv shows had their day and were seen as distasteful or whatever.

they know longer term instead of the names of the horrible people being remembered it’s the ‘and the ME people got really upset’ or whatever flase memory because people remember gist and semantics and groups over names and specifics. And as with Jeremy Kyle after a decade people look back and say that wasn’t a proud time but it doesn’t seem to stop the reinvention popping up.

I don’t know enough about Norway (other than the country clearly having a big issue atm with ME bigotry due to certain quarters seeding it at least). Did they also always have these types of things and how are they seen by the majority/how niche is the audience?

 

Well all that points to a clear misogyny issue and ME and the set up behind it just giving free license that it’s ok as long as it’s under the context of that vehicle. Which to me debunks any claims those doing it might have that they are caring about patients and not really just stoking stigma

 

The report on women’s health has been published by the committee now, and I see that Silje Reme is one of several people that were invited to have presentations for the committee. Reme’s talk was on «sex/gender differences in pain». I can’t find any information on the presentation.

I wonder if she was invited to speak to the women's health committee before or after she was a guest on Eia’s podcast.