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

Or as Garner wrote in his June 23 BMJ blog: “Health services are largely institutionally prejudiced against people with chronic fatigue and ME, and in some cases these attitudes are framing the service response to covid-19.”

So he recognised the systemic or institutional prejudice – a very serious allegation for someone in his position to make – and then chose to side with those responsible for it, and to compound it.

[edited to add hyperlink to BMJ blog]

2 points:

1) Yes. As has been pointed out many time before on here, we should give far greater weight to testimonies of harm from interventions than testimonies of recovery. As @Barry once noted, the weight of evidence needed to demonstrate that an aircraft is safe to fly is necessarily far greater than the weight of evidence needed to ground it due to safety concerns.

2) There is no equivalence between Paul Garner (Professor of Tropical Medicine, Director of the Centre for Evidence Synthesis in Global Health and Co-ordinating Editor of the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group) writing in the BMJ and some random, anonymous person on Twitter saying angry things in repose to him. Garner represents the institutions that employ him and his article would have been approved by the BMJ. Anonymous tweeters represent nobody other than themselves, and they don’t have the benefit of having their tweets vetted by an editor of a medical journal.

Although we disagree about some of this, I’m grateful to you for putting the counter arguments, @Esther12. I also agree that some angry tweets can be unhelpful and counterproductive. I’ve asked a couple of people to delete their responses to the clip I posted (nearly 60,000 views now), but most have been perfectly reasonable – and not a single person has tried to defend CG’s comments in my timeline. I also note that Frances Ryan’s (Guardian columnist) retweet of the clip in which she described CG’s comments as “absolutely chilling” has been liked over 1200 times and retweeted nearly 500 times.

 

I have only followed the twitter discussion in as much as what has been posted here, but has anyone pointed out that Clare Gerada is Simon Wesselys wife? or has it just been assumed that people are already aware of the history?
(maybe a link https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Wessely_school might help give it some context)

 

100% agree. This was an excellent post by @mango

 

He never actually said it out loud, though. The "physical symptoms of depression" is by far the most common interpretation I see in the wild when physicians voice their opinion about ME. He could have come out and said it, it would have made some difference, especially if his followers echoed it. He never did, never will. Because he wants the conflation, it suits his purpose, just as Gerada and Greenhalgh are doing, pretending they aren't doing that. They want the confusion, the ambiguity. This ideology lives in parables and near-religious sentiments, it needs misinformation to stay alive.

 

I could not pass the delicious irony:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1358095035812700162


The least self-aware rock of my tiger-repelling rocks collection is vastly more self-aware than this. Seems typical, Sharpe and Wessely do the same.

For easier viewing, not sure who the "skeptic" is:

 

I was referring to the "LymeScience" twitter account, by the way. Generally, they're pretty good at refraining from passing judgment on equivocal issues, but.. yeah, taking Vogt at face value tells you all that you need to know.

 

Top post @mango

Please do post on the BMJ blog if you want to. It's great

 

The Myth of The “Good” Disabled Person

 

Sharing just to show how Garner's blog post is being used as an example for everyone.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1356716675605942274

https://twitter.com/user/status/1356726000672006147

https://twitter.com/user/status/1356728505971712000

 

Uh, sounds like gaslighting to me. Even though poor guy even mentioned this is against the recommendation of the long covid clinic.

 

I don't block many people on Twitter but Henrik Vogt is on that short list. He wrote some unforgivable abhorrent comments about a family that suffered the most horrendous M.E. related tragedy a few years ago. This is like a watered down version of a similar sentiment.

 

Perhaps the most damning indictment of the BPS bigwigs is that they are happy to cheer on the most cringeworthy of alternative mind-body practitioners.

 

Hope I am not digressing too much but has anyone shared Gerada is still at it? She posted the above on 7 Feb. Then went on to defend saying the same incorrect statement as in her BBC interview in light of a recent - IMO badly headlined - article on CFS and ‘exercise’, tweet below, that she was sent. https://www.livestrong.com/article/13729946-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-exercise/

 

Picture two didn’t attach in post above.

 

"He could do that after".

After what?

It's ironic that Henrik doesn't read what people write. Maneesh has been the peak example of calm stoicism and doing exactly what the BPS cult sells. If he'd bothered to read any of it, including the damn tweet he's spamming on.

And of course Garner wrote that exercise was the key: "back on track" after his military training (while having dengue fever, I guess? It's not as if the story is any clear). I guess Henrik didn't even read it? At least beyond checking for the buzzwords from the LP pamphlet.

 

Love to show my inability to understand cause and effect, or what the word "cause" means, or how transitive properties work. Everything must be at one degree of separation and no further, if something is a cause but itself has a cause then only the proximate cause must count (as long as it promotes BPS ideology, otherwise causes must be peeled back all the way to the first turtle).

https://twitter.com/user/status/1359545857608187904


This is seriously all a game to them, they do not take their job seriously beyond how it affects them personally, take no responsibility in the influence that was misguidedly handed to them, making off-hands comments recklessly without any regard for real-life impacts. They do this like brains in a jar, solipsists the whole lot of them.

 

I wondered about that and presumed that Vogt must be suggesting that it was not the exercise which had the effect but the change in attitudes and beliefs which enabled the exercise to be done. All nonsense, of course.

EDIT in response to post #676

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1359546303290740740