Protocol ReCOVer: A RCT testing the efficacy of CBT for preventing chronic post-infectious fatigue among patients diagnosed with COVID-19.

And of course if you are being encouraged to ignore your body's alarm signals, which online CBT can do as effectively as any other CBT, then you can still deteriorate and be harmed by it.

 

Yes. "Evidence-based" is little more than a sound bite for many supposed scientists.

 

Yes, you do read accounts of some people’s experience of say GET where the practitioner is so skilled at getting participants to a stable base line and at encouraging them not to over exert that it becomes more like a form of pacing. Also I have read people saying such as ‘my health was getting out of hand, so I did a few weeks GET to get back on track’, presumably this was getting to a stable baseline activity level rather than increasing activity by small increments. Online intervention will prevent the caring and compassion of the practitioner from interfering with the process.

 

Think is, if people actually manage to do as told, to ignore their symptoms and carry on, then there will be no need for any medical services ever again, apart from undertakers, who aren't typically regarded as part of the 'health' services.

People only go to doctors because of symptoms, if they are ignoring all symptoms, then no GP visits, which means no hospital referrals, for anything, including psychiatry/psychology.

They might get the odd person whose chopped off an arm with a combine harvester or something, but probably not early enough to be useful - and even that's doubtful as in a culture where all symptoms are to be ignored.....

The payoffs would however be substantial, a saving of at least £120 billion a year, in the UK alone, on healthcare, and a boon to the undertaking industry.

That's probably at least 6 Bentleys.

Win win - unless you're a psychiatrist

 

In the description they lump all symptoms under the label of fatigue. So a symptom has its own symptoms. Despite being known for being its own thing. Makes sense. Totally good science. Smart science.

Textbook "I reject reality and substitute my own".

 

Interesting comment from Goudsmit. I, too, would love this trial to include medical professionals, this would give them a good opportunity for the time to actually look at the actual substance of this ideology.

Seriously, I would very much like physicians suffering from post-COVID-19 illness to go through that. With comments and parting words and all. Definitely do this.

Although with an invalid methodology, biased researchers with massive conflicts of interest and no objective assessment the scientific value of this experiment is exactly zero. And, again, not controlled. There literally is no treatment as usual yet and anyway it would still be a bunch of different things so not even close to being a valid control. It's a randomized experiment, not even worth calling this a trial. I hate liars like that but most of all I don't understand how they get away with lying constantly. What a broken mess, evidence-based medicine is a catastrophic failure.

 

I wondered about that as well. I know that Knoop feels that the rationale behind the treatment of fatigue is the same. Regardless of the condition. So he'll probably treat "chronic fatigue" as usual.

Here's an article about that subject in Dutch. He published a study about it as well but I don't remember which one it was.

https://www.lvmp.nl/interview-met-hans-knoop/


Edit: I think the study was discussed here;

https://www.s4me.info/threads/is-fa...onditions-dutch-cbt-proponents-involved.4327/

 

Wow, it didn't take long for these grifters to expand their grift operation to the new goldmine of rapidly growing numbers of post-covid ME/CFS patients. Utterly despicable.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1291784625132638210

 

A randomised controlled trial testing the efficacy of Fit after COVID, a cognitive behavioural therapy targeting severe post-infectious fatigue following COVID-19 (ReCOVer): study protocol
https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-021-05569-y

Same basic formula as always. Complete waste of research funding.

The ReCOVer study is a multicentre 2-arm randomised controlled trial (RCT) to test the efficacy of Fit after COVID on severe post-infectious fatigue. Participants are eligible if they report severe fatigue 3 up to and including 12 months following COVID-19. One hundred and fourteen participants will be randomised to either Fit after COVID or care as usual (ratio 1:1).

The primary outcome, the fatigue severity subscale of the Checklist Individual Strength (CIS-fatigue), is assessed in both groups before randomisation (T0), directly post CBT or following care as usual (T1), and at follow-up 6 months after the second assessment (T2).

In addition, a long-term follow-up (T3), 12 months after the second assessment, is performed in the CBT group only. The primary objective is to investigate whether CBT will lead to a significantly lower mean fatigue severity score measured with the CIS-fatigue across the first two follow-up assessments (T1 and T2) as compared to care as usual.

Secondary objectives are to determine the proportion of participants no longer being severely fatigued (operationalised in different ways) at T1 and T2 and to investigate changes in physical and social functioning, in the number and severity of somatic symptoms and in problems concentrating across T1 and T2.
​

The "intervention":

The main part of the intervention is based on an existing CBT manual for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) by our research group [46] and was adapted by experienced cognitive behavioural therapists (HK, TK). As the original CBT manual for CFS, Fit after COVID is based on a cognitive behavioural model of fatigue [26].

According to this model, a disease or stressor (here: COVID-19) initially triggers fatigue while cognitive behavioural variables perpetuate fatigue. The seven perpetuating factors addressed in Fit after COVID are (1) disrupted sleep-wake pattern, (2) dysfunctional beliefs about fatigue, (3) low or unevenly distributed level of activity, (4) perceived low social support, (5) problems with processing the acute phase of COVID-19, (6) fears and worries regarding COVID-19, and (7) poor coping with pain.​

I'm fairly sure that "cognitive behavioural variables" is not a thing. Whatever, everything is made-up and nothing matters in BPSland.

 

They also say:

Though it seems that these are only measured at baseline and immediately after treatment.

 

I think the trial has already started and I guess they didn't explain this way?

 

I feel as if it gives useful information about that point of time. That they're only collecting it right after the intervention, before patients have had time to see how this approach fit within their lives over the longer term is more of a problem imo.