Psychology Today: In Search of a Coherent Understanding of ME/CFS and Long Covid, Jake Hollis

[rvallee]

Besides, I thought our problem was supposed to be that we are too negative. Now our problem is that we are too positive? These people need to get their story straight.

Good old Goldilocks fallacy. We're wrong because we don't do it "just right". It could be that we're doing too much of it, or too little of it, or both, but it's never "just right". Only they know how to do it "just right". Based on what? They just know. Somehow. But what's important is that they're always right, and we're always wrong, and need to listen to their wise advice so we can find out how to do it the "just right" way.

By extension, those who recover did it "just right". Even if we did all the same things they did. Even if they didn't do most of the things they said anyway. We know they did it "just right" because they're recovered, and have to do the same things they did. Just like all the "self-made millionaires" out there. Most of whom happen to have well-connected rich parents, total coincidence. Even though for every one of them at least 100 people did all the same things, some did them better, and it's ultimately almost all chance, their way is the "just right" way retroactively because, well, they're rich now, and the others, who did all the same things, aren't.

It's like if brain damage were a theoretical model.

 

[NelliePledge]

What on earth will he cover next!!

Oh dear silly me! I would lay money its going to be Catastrophising [roll eye/whistling emoji]

 

[bobbler]

Literally the basis for a "lie detector", aka polygraph. It's complete bunk.

Also, not coincidentally, bunk for exact same reason why all biopsychosocial questionnaires are bunk: some things can be happening for completely different reasons. Real professionals look for those. Quacks don't care.

The traditional pseudoscience around "lie detectors" is that some combination of skin conduction and heart rhythm 'detects' lies, when it does no such thing because that's not how anything works.

Here they substituted lying (or obfuscation, or deceit, or whatever) for fear. Exact same idea. Just as silly. The personality stuff is even more ridiculous, but is still widely believed in the medical profession because they tend to not clean house out of debunked nonsense, it only happens when something that actually works comes along. Which is happening less and less over time.

But it's far more telling about the general junk that is modern psychology, and publications like PT, than about people like Hollis. It's the same problem with Wakefield. He did not self-publish on a personal blog, or in the Journal of Romanian experiential medicine. He was published, and promoted, by the Lancet and its editor-in-chief, both totally escaped any blame whatsoever for doing so.

Because medicine does not do accountability. It works just like politics. It's who has support in the rooms where decisions are made that matters. Not the what and the why. Facts rarely matter here.

in an illness known for issues with temperature regulation and orthostatic issues (which no doubt mean at least at the more micro level 'getting sweaty' when you feel like you might faint, or are just feeling ill from exhaustion due to ME/CFS) and issues with touch.

My hand gets sweaty holding a phone weirdly, it used to be a pen back in the days (we used them more and had eg written exams where you can't choose to use laptop instead) but just holding something for a few minutes can cause visible sweat. And whilst it might happen in situation where whether I am or not someone might attribute 'stress' it also just happened on every phone call including picking up the phone to call a colleague to arrange meeting for lunch or just holding a pen in a meeting that was neither here nor there and I didn't end up needing to write anything.

Not to mention that if you are already ill it is a bit different having been dragged in to watch an 'unpleasant film' vs a student who was going to be on campus anyway or whoever the control was...

It is also worth noting that researchers have identified similar personality traits as vulnerability factors in many other, less contested, physical illnesses, from cancer to multiple sclerosis. Back in 1987, psychologist Lydia Temoshok proposed the “type C” personality, in response to interviews with 150 people with melanoma. She identified people in this group as consistently being: “excessively nice, pleasant to a fault, uncomplaining and unassertive”."

This isn't really making a discovery to cherry-pick 150 subjects based on whatever recruitment plan from people with an illness, who are by virtue of being so ill in a completely different situation to those who don't have it - tho it seems there wasn't a control anyway.

Rather than do a longitudinal study of representative selection of not ill people with and without said personality to see if they actual did somehow go on get more of these conditions - if there were such a thing as a 'Type', her suggestion wasn't internally/externally inconsistent (everyone has their own idea of what it is and something with it 'is like'), and it was indeed a consistent and ongoing thing/set of traits - and so people would have it before they got ill and after.

Goodness knows what was sold to these people - back then cancer treatment was nowhere near the survival rate it is now - and whether they thought they were having conversations with someone who was looking to help them and others with the condition. I'm curious how on earth they thought they could assess if someone was 'unassertive' in such a situation?

 

[bobbler]

This might be better off on another thread of its own that is more generic (as there are more papers in this area, if I or anyone else can go to the lengths to add them one day) but this paper by Temoshek and Wald themselves in 2001

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1534735402001002005

is an interesting read of the iterative bunfight and self-persuasion that this all went through back then

but that latest stuff seems to be trying to resurrect and rebrand citing the earlier stuff from and not the critiques etc. and makes me wonder why one would pick a 1987 study? and not a 2001 review by the same author or other later papers in a balanced way once the full debate and picture + critique on these things had developed

"The widely discussed 1989 study by Spiegel and colleagues, which suggested that a psychosocialgroup intervention affected survival in metastatic breast cancer, was not replicated by Goodwin and colleagues in 2001. We analyze methodological issues in both studies, including issues of sampling, randomization, interpretation, and the adequacy and validity of psychosocial constructs and measures to assess hypothesized ingredients of change."