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

https://www.meresearch.org.uk/letter-the-guardian-re-graded-exercise-therapy-and-long-covid/

 

He's openly plugging the Lightning Process now:

What is interesting is that he (and others who claim to be have recovered from the LP) never mention whether they are now able to return to work on a full time basis again. A lot seem to go on to be LP practitioners instead.

I'm willing to bet that many are still very sick but are lying to themselves and others about it.

 

Then:

Now:

Which is it, Paul?

 

Now, now. We aren't going to prevent people from changing their beliefs in the face of better evidence and experience, are we?
Nah just kidding. It's not every day that you get such a salient example of how much people's opinions are usually based on their own preconceptions. And just because their preconceptions evolved doesn't mean their epistemic framework did.

>"If you expect things to happen then they do."

If the directionality and magnitude of this hypothetical effect are EBM-sanctioned, it's "placebo/nocebo". If it's not, it's magical thinking. It's always hilarious how medicine fashions its own tools to hack together the auxiliary hypotheses needed to justify anything.

>"What is interesting is that doctors with long experience in treating and researching post viral syndromes have been in touch, saying how much common sense I had written."

Great example of bothsides-ism. The fact that the overwhelming majority of patients, doctors or not, disagree with him, should clue him in on something. I'm sure you could find an army of doctors to support any statement you want about just about any condition.

>And I replied “please hold on to your critical appraisal skills”.

Right on, Paul.

 

And Miller was the medic responsible for assessing harms in the FINE trial and I think PACE too.

I have a story from the FINE trial. I'll dig it out when I am back at my desktop later.

 

Quote from Garner: There’s an ME dogma that anything to do with the mind-body connection should be rejected, anything to do with exercise therapy should be rejected.

I would also point out that M.E. folks do not reject exercise, I'm sure that almost all of us try to keep exercising and many of us went for GET and CBT and tried to do what was recommended. We're not saying exercise is bad from dogma we're saying it from experience.
Exercise for M.E. is very much wrecking a square peg trying to hammer it into a round hole.

 

So I wonder what Hilda Bastion thinks of Paul Garner's expert analysis?
'It so important to read what you want to read.'
The Cochrane emperor really has nothing on now.

 

That's the opposite of gaslighting, surely. And, if you're in a dark, dank, gaslit basement by yourself and you blow out the offendingly-spooky light, the gas will start to rise and... Quick! Someone go down there and get him out of there!

 

I definitely only developed it when I got ME, and the same goes for some other folk I know. It reliably triggers PEM, and it isn't the result of a dietary excess or underlying diabetes. A slice of cake can be enough.

In common with activity, it depends how my ME is generally. If I'm having a good run I can tolerate more refined sugar, but if I keep on eating it, it will cause a downturn. This is most likely to happen over Christmas, even though I'm doing less activity than usual because the weather's too rubbish to go out; people bring cakes and mince pies, and because it's such a dark, gloomy time of year (and because I'm an idiot), I end up eating them.

 

Actually, I do recognise something similar. Especially from patient groups on FB! Some patients can be way too fast to attribute their symptom fluctuations to all sorts - something they ate, something they did, mouldy wall, changes in the weather, new supplement, etc. They can get really worked up. I've seen it again and again. It's definitely a minority, though.

Edit. No, this is definitely not only confined to this illness.

 

Thats interesting Kitty, I stand corrected, thank you for sharing. It seems to make no difference to me whatsoever, that must be a right pain! A little bit of 'nice' keeps me going sometimes
As you say, calling it an 'allergy' isnt very good from a doctor though.

Really? wow, thanks for sharing that, i again stand corrected. I guess it's easy to do when you're a layman grasping for answers to things that make no sense, especially in the beginning.

I imagine that the occasional person perhaps feels frightened & gets obsessed too. It would be interesting to find out if those who report recovery/improvement from the CBT/LP type approaches are those who get obsessed/feel frightened.

 

I suspect Paul Garner’s policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.

 

I've just tried to reply to a converstaion on Paul Garner's twitter feed. I've discovered that he has put limits on who is able to respond to posts. So it's probable that his twitter feed is about to become very one-sided.

(I was blocked by Trisha Greenlaugh some time ago, like many others, even though I never interacted with her at all and as far as I am aware, my posts in general are always polite.)

I don't know why I feel this so acutely. I suppose that I'm fairly comfortable generally, with folk having different opinions ... as long as I am free to give my response. But when I am denied a voice in an area that has been so damaging, I feel extremely hurt.

Honestly? To me this feels like a form of abuse.

 

On Twitter:

 

The executive director editor of The Lancet applauding blatant quackery peddled by a Cochrane co-founder and section director is late-stage institutional brain rot:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1371052932070789128


Notable fact: if you believe in it it will happen to you is quite literally the book The Secret, I suspect that it makes up a huge chunk of the LP belief system so here is the executive director of The Lancet pretty much applauding The Secret as medical treatment for a disease neither she nor Garner actually understand and this is everything wrong with medicine in its pure, distilled form

Edit: executive editor, not director

 

So Dr Paul Garner admits that he is a scatterbrained panicky wimp - does that mean that anyone else is?

 

Actually, I have just thought of a wizard wheeze to save the government hundreds of millions of pounds. There is no need to set up these research studies to find out about Long Covid because Dr Garner already knows all about it - he said so on telly. We can stop doing trials and epidemiology and just listen to his wisdom - its called verbal flatulence-based medicine.