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

Yes and I wondered if it was a damage limitation exercise, trying to cool down the furor surrounding PG's BMJ piece because he came out of that really badly and they realised this so they tried to mitigate it a wee bit by getting him and Gerada on TV to make him seem not as extreme and unpleasant towards PWME and PWLC? i.e. no mention from either of them of military type exercise, limited derogatory comments about ME/CFS and online groups, much more toned down but definitely not good.

And I find it interesting that they had Gerada on too.

Could the BPS/SMC cabal have been behind helping PG to get all the media and BMJ coverage he has had over the past months?

I was astonished reading Suffolkres post 237 on this thread (page 12) with all the media coverage he has had, but maybe that is what can legitimately happen in the media in such situations with no pushing from the shadows, I don't know, but having Gerada pop up like that makes me immediately suspicious.

 

She's never off News 24! I've developed a bad habit of leaving it on some some days after watching the lunchtime news, and she seems to pop up onscreen at least once a week, answering some question or other about Covid. The BBC doesn't seem to know another GP/former GP.

 

https://www.actionforme.org.uk/news/our-ceo-responds-to-prof-paul-garner/

 

It's a shame they don't have anyone to advise them on media presentation.

 

Here’s the transcript of what Clare Gerada said:

I will do the transcript for PG’s bit in a separate post, I’m about halfway through it now.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1354813825447469059


I’m wondering whether to submit a formal complaint to the BBC. @Jonathan Edwards, please can you list a few conditions other than ME which are unequivocally not made better by exercise? Would it be OK to quote you if I submit a complaint?

 

Paul Garner
@PaulGarnerWoof
·
Jan 25
I had Long Covid & met Canadian consensus criteria for ME/CFS. I have recovered: I feel that I have looked down the barrel of the ME/CFS gun and disarmed it. I write this to my fellow longhaulers #LongCovid #MECFS #postviral #longhaulers https://tinyurl.com/y6py7hrh

 

Disarmed it? No

What he's done is taken it and pointed it at us.

 

Can we expect an assault on NICE draft guidelines?

#DrWoof works in close proximity to Mike Beardsworth , and Trish Greenhalgh's intervention looks as if it was choreographed by Prof Sir Simon Wessely. I was concerned at our glorious #ME charities self congratulatory outpourings over recent draft guidelines. Chris Burton (see graphic ) is director of - https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/scharr/research/centres/ctru/mss3

 

I know that he wrote that. In my post that you quoted, I was referring to the interview with Garner on BBC Breakfast.

 

Might it be quicker to list ones that are? It's not going to improve many cancers, autoimmune conditions, dementias, or even some degenerative diseases...

 

She did say that it was good for everything - she didn't limit it to medical matters

So a little bit of moderate exercise may be all we need to repay the national debt, cure world hunger, get perishable food into the EU before it spoils, and rising sea levels, floods, people melting in the streets, all can, according to Clare Gerada be solved by moderate exercise, as all fit within 'everything' - universe full of options for things that exercise doesn't, IMO, help - but she is the 'expert' so I'm probably wrong.

Why do I feel like this is like the 70s/80s videos on how to survive a nuke?

 

And as promised here’s the transcript of what Paul Garner’s said:

That’s all of it. I’m off for a rest now.

 

Just a moment. He has learnt about the importance of gentle exercise. I thought he was engaging in military style exercises with his mates in Sefton Park. The message seems to be mixed.

 

One consolation is that they are way too heavy-handed and moving too fast at once. Going to promote a N=1 anecdote after just a few weeks on national television like this takes all the subtlety of the years-long approach they took with us.

Which is interesting because although they go to serious efforts to keep the two separated, their motivation in pushing this for LC is obviously the precedent with us. Which they can't admit. The only alternative is milking individual anecdotes like this, which is dereliction of duty.

At least this will completely discredit Greenhalgh, but it also discredits the entire system of medicine. These two are supposed to be experts in medical evidence. And here they are pushing an unhinged single anecdote and jumping straight to advising people to follow this advice. It takes the whole system to have broken down to get to that point. How can anyone trust anything coming out of medicine given this? The whole point of giving medicine so much power is that it is not supposed to engage in this kind of magical thinking and BS salesmanship.

If those are the experts in medical evidence, what does it say about the rest who work in medicine? That they are so gullible they'll accept literally any morsel of evidence in favor of magical psychology.

 

Well, she's now disqualified herself from writing, or having any involvement with developing, the new/updated training module on ME/CFS for GPs....

This statement also clearly shows how inappropriate the (only recently removed) RCGP one was.

 

I feel as if Garner's blogs had been pretty consistently personal, emotional and with information that seemed pretty questionable. There were things about this that seemed odd and a bit worrying to me, but I hadn't been arguing that the BMJ should retract them, and my concern was limited because I thought it was pretty clear what they were. They were more like a diary than anything else.

eg there was this in the first blog in this thread:

There are things about his most recent blog that are more of a problem than others, and they will particularly stand out to those whose lives have been made worse by the problems around PACE/FINE/etc, but I want to keep my response to this in proportion to my response to his other blogs, some of which were praised by a lot of other patients. I know that a lot of people here have been consistently critical of the way anecdotes are often over-promoted, but would people be equally condemning of the BMJ for publishing Garner if his new anecdote driven blog was about how he'd been harmed by doctors putting a positive spin on GET and now (for some reason) thinks he will never recover? I think that we'd be raising concern that he really should not assume that he won't recover, but I doubt there'd be much outrage.

We're in a difficult situation as personal stories seem to influence people more than, for example, explaining problems with the way academic papers have presented their data. Personal stories are so often shaped by the individual's hunches and post-hoc rationalisations, and those that are promoted will tend to be those coming from the dominant culture. I just think that we need to encourage consistent caution with all personal stories, including our own.