The ‘cognitive behavioural model’ of chronic fatigue syndrome: Critique of a flawed model, 2019, Geraghty et al

Take your pick:

Have you read the paper?
If yes:

You obviously haven't understood the paper.
If you have:

These points have all been comprehensively addressed before.
If that doesn't work:

Your view is due to (insert malevolent motive here).

I'm prepared to be corrected, but I think that's all they've been able to come up with for the last few decades, so I'll be amazed if they come up with anything different now. Perhaps "You are now blocked" - does that count as a response?

 

IMO, and I may be wrong, I'm happy, though not really, to be proved wrong, all of the responses given to any criticism amount to

"Wibble!!!"

Admittedly with the emphasis on different syllables from time to time.

Not the most constructive post I've ever made, or even today, and I've apparently made some stinkers today, but, it's my point of view.

 

I finally managed to read the whole thing. Late to the party.

I too felt it was at times a bit quick in jumping from one thing to another.

The biomedical abnormalities were a bit too overstated?

PEM is an important part why CBT and GET do not work. That wasn't too well explained? Maybe I missed that bit. Fried brain.

That being said the paper clearly shows that the model does not fit with the patients experience of the disease at all. That the whole thing is just eminence based, based on some ideas of a group of psychiatrists and psychologists. Their little fantasy.

That devalidation of our experience is the most valuable of this paper. You really feel they went of the rails and it had nothing to do with the disease and its patients community.

So in all a great job. Awesome paper to share everywhere

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1190711912243351555

https://twitter.com/user/status/1190712233614962689

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1190718500458967040

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1190725593857495046

 

This cuts to the heart of it. In the lack of any real evidence base the whole thing, lock stock and barrel, on ... assumptions! The mind set that seems to drive so much of these people's 'research'.

 

It's a bit of a nit-picky point but as there is now some good discussion on the divide between the biological and P-S model I'd like to see more discussion around the social aspect of BPS.

All three of these components have some validity for illness (just not in the ways twisted by it's current proponents). The social aspect gets pretty much ignored for the most part as the BPS people get so excited about the shame and blame part (although they've developed a whole new way of phrasing this to soften the blow and /or disguise the intent and/or fool themselves).

ETA: Apologies if this goes away from main topic.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1190741564756299777

https://twitter.com/user/status/1190743033517617153

https://twitter.com/user/status/1190744152201482240



The paper itself doesn't mention the financial conflicts of interest.

 

I think read this comment with a lot of scepticism. It related to the so-called "empiric" CDC CFS criteria which were a very odd set of criteria as the paper itself explains.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1190768986801213441

 

I recently found this is Stephen Strauss's 1988 paper

While already yielding a tantalizing series of observations, future immunologic studies of patients with chronic fatigue need to be undertaken in a more orderly fashion, and patients who are physically deconditioned or clinically depressed should be included as additional control subjects.

The Chronic Mononucleosis Syndrome
Stephen E. Straus
The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Volume 157, Issue 3, March 1988, Pages 405–412, https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/157.3.405

https://sci-hub.se/10.1093/infdis/157.3.405

It seems rather odd that the idea of a deconditioned control group was not taken up and tested before Wessely et al decided in 1989 that deconditioning was a fundamental and treatable part of the illness.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1190999386538627072

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1191000389581230080

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1191000949348872193

 

This sounds like the author thinks ME is a type of mass hysteria and that it is perpetuated by online information saying that it is a physical illness perpetuated by viruses. If that were true than CBT should have a very high effectiveness rate. All you should have to do is to convince patients to stop avoiding exercise and they would normalize. Treatment should be very easy. However we know this isn't the case.

https://www.meassociation.org.uk/20...in-me-cfs-by-dr-keith-geraghty-27-april-2019/


The limitations post-ME initiation are all too real even when one forces oneself to exercise vigorously. There are cases of atheletes getting ME who were at a very high level of conditioning. Also of professionals and scholars no longer being able to think at a high creative level. This hypothesis is rubbish.

 

The BPS cabal seem to thing that everything, up to and including gravity, can be attributed to mass hysteria.

 

What does BPS stand for?