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

Ok so probably his friends in Norway. I would do some sleuthing but it's been a while since I did any Wikipedia stuff. Can you see the other edits from this user?

 

It’s here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_Garner_(doctor)&action=historyPaul Garner (doctor): Revision history - Wikipedia

The IP address starts with 158, so you can search for it.

 

The page for Garner was created by Manu Mathew, which describes himself like this on his profile:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Manum56User:Manum56 - Wikipedia

It might not be the same person, but a Manu Mathew has been involved in Cochrane, e.g. here (page 6):
https://community.cochrane.org/sites/default/files/uploads/inline-files/UPDATED OA Pack.pdfhttps://community.cochrane.org/sites/default/files/uploads/inline-files/UPDATED OA Pack.pdf

 

Can’t believe he tagged @nice I feel embarrassed for him

 

"Being retired" seems to mean more outspoken in the media and other venues.

 

It’s like the philosophy experiment - if a tree falls in the forest but there’s nobody there, does it make a sound?

 

I wish some journalist would delve into his shenanigans because something is shady with this man.

 

Low public interest, unfortunately. There is a story there, but who would be bothered to.

 

Maybe I don't know enough about Wakefield and I'm wrong, but Garner and his gang seem far more extreme to me. The difference being that although most patients think he's a jackass, most physicians agree with him. Wakefield had the explicit support of the Lancet, and the personal support of its editor-in-chief for 12 years, but most physicians were definitely not on their side, were on the right side of the controversy.

Meanwhile Garner's BS is literally the current standard, cruelly enforced with no restraint. He's only saying the same things that most physicians think, but in a more extreme way. And he does that precisely because they are platformed and supported, with the backing of most professional associations and regulatory bodies. It's not as if this level of extremism is anything new, Wessely achieved getting us compared to terrorists in the public eye, and he wasn't alone in that either.

I'm pretty sure Wakefield and whoever supported him would have been just as extreme if they had that vote of confidence, but they did not, and here this rotten ideology absolutely does.

And although the antivaccine movement has and will continue to kill and maim a lot of people, there probably aren't many suicides of despair, which appears to be the main cause of death for people with ME/CFS. Even if the death and injury count is lower, there is something far more morally bankrupt in causing so much misery and suffering that so many people kill themselves, knowing that help isn't not just on the way, but is intentionally being held back. It's like a prison guard who takes special attention to a detainee, assuring them that they will make their life hell.

For this, I find the psychobehavioral quacks to be far more disturbingly immoral. All made so much worse that it gets enthusiastic thumbs up from the medical profession. On that there is absolutely great public interest, but the difference is that this is accepted social murder. In the end this is all that matters. This here is every bit as immoral as the antivaccine movement, but one has almost unanimous professional benediction, and as a consequence high public support, while the other has very low professional support, but growing public approval.

Public approval that will only keep growing because the medical profession keeps blundering, including by pushing extremist nonsense like this. Because if institutions are willing to be this dishonorable in pushing for harmful pseudoscience, then what other extremist shady stuff do they do? It could be all there is, but that's not very convincing. Certainly not for people looking for conspiracies.

And this extremism will not fall back down. A latest, and especially disgusting, messaging has been explicitly that all those suicides of despair they are explicitly responsible for are actually our fault, for depriving them of hope. Peak banality of evil. Hard to see any difference at all with some recent far-right messaging about NPCs (non-playable characters, an explicitly dehumanizing framing that casts some people as openly disposable, whose lives don't matter, being nothing more than background in the lives of people who suffer from main character fallacy).

 

Can anyone remember whether Paul Garner reported improving as a result of any specific formal treatment?

My impression was that he did not and that all he needed to get better was to realise he could get better. So presumably things like the Lightning Process are not necessary for getting better like him. So why is he recommending these quack programmes?

 

I found this post

 

He had a phone talk with Landmark where she talked to him while he rode a bike. I’m not sure if he ever completed an LP course.

I can’t find the source for the bike ride, but here is a good summary of his BMJ posts:
https://valerieeliotsmith.com/2021/...arming-flip-flop-on-recovery-from-long-covid/Professor Garner, The BMJ and me: an alarming flip-flop on recovery from long Covid | valerieeliotsmith

 

Thanks.

There was also I think a story about having a telephone conversation with a psychiatrist in the USA who put him on to somebody in Norway or something like that but I am not sure at what point.

Edit: and thanks Utsikt. I wasn't aware that we knew it was landmark but presumably a telephone call is not an expensive three day formal brainwashing session. So it isn't needed. All you need is to know what she said in the phone call.

 

It was Vogt that put him in contact with Landmark. I don’t know how he got in contact with Vogt.

 

It does seem clear from Valerie's piece that you do not need to do the LP and you do not need any recent brain science. You just have to remember what you thought back in the 1980s about min dover matter - no need to invoke the limbic system or tensor diffusion tomography.

 

I am fairly sure there was some old American friend of his in psychiatry who suggested Norway but I have no idea of the source.

 

Garner discusses a bit about what he attributes his recovery to here:

https://www.recoverynorway.org/2021/12/31/paul-garner-professor-recovery-norway-story-long-covid/

 

OK, thanks, that seems clear.
So there is no need to get involved in mind body or brain re-training programmes. You just need to wake up to the fact that you have been bicycling, running and scuba diving for months and may not be quite as ill as you were saying to yourself, friends and social media.

 

I know a lot of people who know him and witnessed him exercising (in public) regularly during the Summer and prior to “recovery” if Monbiot wants me to hook him up for an expose. It caused consternation.

 

Imagine being so ill after Covid, that you clock up 85 media appearances talking about it, say you meet the CCC for ME, yet you manage a holiday in the Caribbean where you contract Dengue fever, and declare yourself cured. All in 9 months.