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

Exactly this. Sharpe's attempt to play the victim didn't work last time and this further attempt just goes to show how desperate they are as we continue to make progress. This is a storm in a teacup; an unpleasant one admittedly but in time it will have as much impact as Sharpe's article did the first time.

 

It's not a conspiracy, Garner is just desperate to be liked now that he doesn't have a reason to fight anyone's corner.

Backing Sharpe, arguably the least sympathetic of all the people that, a mere three months ago, he was saying were the bane of ME patients' existence is the icing on the cake.

 

Vitriol is natural coming from people who have been treated very badly.

 

My mum and brother, both with M.E. think the same. I currently think he's not clever enough for that, thought it's possible someone may be playing him like a piece on a chessboard.

 

Nothing in the least bit new on that score .

 

I am still not sure about the degree of Garners personal vulnerability and do not want to descend into ad hominem polemics. I suspect the turning on ME Assoc is simply due to joining the other tribe and adopting their methods which do typically employ stereotypes and petty exclusionary politics in the media to try to win arguments by belittling and marginalising PWME and set a very poor example in so doing.

Vitriol is a reply in kind and well judged invective can be effective but we should beware playing their game as they not above trying to wrongfoot us in the media, which is what I think this kind of comment is really about, a taunt.

Unfortunately that is the kind of attitude we are up against and we all know it comes from sinecure seekers serving the propaganda agenda of health insurers and misguided healthcare bureaucrats.

The comforting thought is, this puerile blaggery is all they have got and all they ever had.

Which works when there is no science to contradict it but fails when there is and people stand up to them, which we will of course because we have to.

In this time when evidence based medicine is in the ascendant the respect for science is magnified and I feel confident we will prevail as long as we continue to develope the evidence based scientific perspective and make the case in the media, which of course they dont want us to do, they want to drag us into a Trumpian slanging match and reduce our argument to the level of theirs.

So for now, sticks and stones. We should be careful how we defeat them and keep the moral high ground but defeat them we will.

PS Hilda made some questionable choices with her descriptors, "activists" aka the patient lobby are not arguing against scientists, we represent the science and work with scientists, it is the BPS lobby who are unscientific. That is not helpful as a counterargument and actually serves their agenda by falling into their elephant trap, painting them as scientists and us as a rabble of ignorami, which we are not.

 

Yup.

I think he's best ignored completely by patients. Let him shout into the void.

 

Cock-up is always more common than conspiracy, even if there is plenty of conspiracy. If Garner had engineered all this he would have done a better job of it.

I suspect that Garner now outBPSing the BPS crowd indicates that he is doing a sackcloth and ashes session to placate his friends for having been silly enough to think for a moment that ME/CFS advocates might be sympathetic intelligent people.

 

This guy is so lucky to have recovered from his postviral fatigue syndrome. He has no comprehension of just how lucky he is. Those of us long haulers who have had periods of remission, sometimes lasting YEARS, know that the rug pull can come at any moment and you can find yourself sicker and more disabled than ever before out of nowhere and without any apparent reason. He thinks his magical thinking and ritualistic incantations will help him fend off the demons. He has done nothing to deserve his recovery. Everything he imagines he has done to help himself get out of the predicament he was in is entirely coincidental to the sheer dumb luck of spontaneous recovery he experienced. 90% of PVFS patients get better. His outcome is the modal outcome yet he imagines he is special and better than us. He imagines himself to be the hero in his personal drama narrative of bravely pulling himself up by the bootstraps and standing up to nasty, militant ME/CFS patients.

 

The power of the BPS narrative is how it flatters one's ego. You get to tell sick people that they're preventing their own with recovery through negativity and this is, according to the BPS narrative, how you help the patients.

Behaviour that would get you labelled as emotionally abusive in other contexts is elevated to therapeutic intervention through the BPS narrative (as long as you say it nicely and smile while doing so).

So what does it say about a person that wants to believe in the BPS narrative and is willing to overlook all the problems with it?

 

Exactly, a classic case of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. This is a very common phenomenon unfortunately. On the long-covid reddit for example many people are convinced their recovery was due to a certain diet, supplement, yoga, mindfulness, etc., while in reality 99% of those people would have recovered even if they did none of those things.

 

Yes (though people are still responsible for their actions, and badly treated people behaving in a way that makes things worse for themselves and other patients is still to be criticised), but I also think that some people have treated Garner badly (though he's starting from a rather more comfortable position than most patients). If we are to be understanding of the vitriol coming from some patients then how understanding should we be of any vitriol coming from Garner?

 

Not all when he, a well connected and well paid health professional who, apparently, has his health, incites it.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1366756201304903686

https://twitter.com/user/status/1366768737240580099

 

I assume he's a medical Doctor in which case he's disowned his training.

If 100 people get I'll and 90 recover - the reasons the others don't might be genetic, ---

If one person turned up at his clinic and announced their recovery was the "power of the Lord Jesus" [I'm in Northern Ireland] then it'd get a laugh but not be taken seriously --- yet his "positive thinking" speech is to be taken seriously ---

@Jonathan Edwards summed these folks up - they went over to Shamanism!

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1366776798378360832

Like clockwork. Leave it to Robert Howard to demonstate his utter hypocrisy and resistance to learning whenever one of his cronies grants him a fit occasion.

 

That's very reassuring. Thank you.

 

I don't think that the responses to Garner are likely to incite anything good for patients either.

Surprised other people seem surprised at him tweeting Kelland's article. Some of the responses he has received almost seems designed to support her work imo. I'd been assuming it was likely that they were already being used in combination with Kelland's work to help discredit patients behind the scenes. But on the plus side...?

 

Yes, this is why we should get NICE to release a statement that they haven't been pressured by patients but found patient involvement valuable and so on.