Paul Garner on Long Covid and ME/CFS - BMJ articles and other media.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1707430148042117262

 

Whenever I read anything about the BPS fanatics I remind myself that psychiatrists must have been threatened for generations by those who are severely mentally ill, and they accepted it as part of the job.

But people with ME (and Long Covid?) are practically treated like terrorists for writing or answering a tweet?

 

Quite interesting to revisit the posts from summer 2020.

 

Worse than a cult because it works on targeting the supporters of the vulnerable to convince them their loved ones are 'pests' who are dragging them 'into the pit' and that they are ill 'because they don't choose the life they love'. Or in various other variations disregarding who they are as the propaganda these people sell is to have contempt for what the pwme is stuck with suffering from.

I mean there are maybe a few cults where it gets the family members to join and then to reject and hate their whatever relative and outcast or hurt them but it is pretty unusual in advertising techniques that seem to be about focusing not directly on the vulnerable but encouraging maltreatment ie behavioural 'psychology' to encourage them to 'hand over their vulnerable' 'to be sorted'.

Cults used to have family members trying to rescue their loved ones from their brainwashing, whereas this 'orrible scenario has actively sought to separate and blame and make having a relationship dependent on someone both being able to fake it and not getting worse, which is of course impossible given they have a condition so they've actively created a situation of abuse.

 

You might want to look up Kelland properly, and her 'niche' type of writing and who she has written 'in support of' in similar ways. I highly doubt what she decided to do with that piece/the reason she was hired to do that piece was anything to do with any pwme or anything that actually happened from them. To infer such without noting that context is to me to be a bad bystander by jumping, as ordered, to find the 'why did they deserve it' in the victim without looking into the history of the perpetrator first. Which of course is what the writer is basically looking to incite.

 

Long Covid Advocacy reporting on Twitter Garner promoting psuedoscience

"Paul flies further down the misinformation rabbit hole In case anyone is wondering please stay away from Living Proof. They occupy a strange corner of twitter that unfortunately includes Long Covid Drs & researchers including Deepak Ravindran (SOS advisor) #disinformation"

Click to expand on screenshot

 

Paul Garner seems to have gone the full distance into quackery.
Even some of the other BPS people ought to find this embarrassing.
How you square this with supposedly academic critique of NICE guidelines beats me.

 

I think they will be embarrassed that he hasn’t been bothering to NHS ify the lingo. He’s failed to muddy the waters he’s let off the foghorn instead of the dog whistle.

But having said that this exactly what many drs and researchers say and think about our predicament. It’s just their language choices are a little more more corporate psychology/health industry pseudoscience and a little less join my new religious/psychotherapy movement.

 

As per comments above - Paul Garner seems to have gone all out believer - some of the more nuanced folks promoting this crap will probably be a tad annoyed by his comments ---.

 

From the group:

*Medical disclaimer: The facilitators of the Mindbuddy groups are not medically trained, and information from this course should not be taken as formal medical advice. The neuroplastic approach is not intended to treat recognised conditions that have clear diagnostic tests, such as multiple sclerosis, diabetes, heart conditions, organ damage or failure, rheumatoid arthritis, cancers, or infections.

So MS, RA et pain is real but if there is no biomarker then it's not real and all in your mind.

They're asking for donations. Why hasn't their hustle paid off yet?

 

As soon as a biomarker is found for a condition for some strange reason their treatment suddenly stops working

 

ok so from the tweet 'the pain is real but the body is not damaged'.

But the approach not intended to treat conditions where there is a test t show that the body IS damaged.

So we are back to the idea that if the basic tests dont show damage that must mean there isnt any. So its not possible for there to be damage that we dont have knowledge or methods to test for. Hubris.
Or even that we do have knowledge & tests to identify but we dont bother to run them because we only do basic testing if nothing shows up on the basics then clearly the body is not damaged and we can proceed with our approach.

Because obviously nobody has anything rare. Ever. We can assumed that rare = doesnt exist so not worth looking into or learning about, or, God fobid, testing for.

I often wonder whether so called 'rare' conditions would seem a lot more common if they were tested for more often.