Trisha Greenhalgh on ME/CFS and Long Covid

Thank you for trying, Trish.

 

Just to note that unlike X/Twitter you don't have to have an account to read Bluesky posts. This could of course change in the future, but I think it's unlikely as it was a "cost-saving" measure brought in by Musk during his initial mismanagement.

 

Trish Greenhalgh‬ ‪@trishgreenhalgh.bsky.social‬
Please stop trolling me. I do a LOT of work to try to influence academic thinking but I am not your puppet.



Good grief. Considering Trish Greenhalgh's acknowledged social friendship with a certain *couple* of prominent and powerful psychosocial Drs, one wonders about this talk of puppets.

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@Trish don’t let it get to you, you tried

 

@Trish , Omigosh, Greenhalgh's responses were utterly bizarre and inappropriate. Hard to understand why she would consider your perfectly reasoned posts 'trolling'. Judging from her mass blocking of everyone with ME in their bio on Twitter, this further reinforces that she appears to have some odd hangup about people with this disease. Thank you for being brave enough to try to engage with her.

 

Given her previous hostility to (and mass-blocking of) pwME, I was surprised at this reply to the thread, where she said she was "turned down for a grant to explore the parallels between persistent LC and ME".

A lot of handwaving about clots and "exhausted T-helper cells" and rehab: perhaps the kind of scientific understanding that is to be expected from a "professor of primary care health sciences". She is a high-profile figure but from a scientific perspective her article does not add anything new and really just contributes to the confusion.

 

Thanks for this thread. I never realised she was problematic until checking it out. Have unfollowed her.

 

She really hasn't produced or said anything useful about LC. It just shows the despair in the patient community for any recognition that isn't dismissive that people would celebrate someone who really hasn't done anything. Her papers on LC were mediocre and while she is still hostile to the obvious fact that ME/CFS is the biggest issue in LC, the LC community has long moved past this. Eventually she will trip and reveal her true beliefs.

It's definitely for the best that she doesn't study the parallels. Or anything having to do with us, directly or indirectly. Anyone confused about this at the 5 year mark has no business doing any of this. Best case is if she just drops the issue and disappears, but it's not like there's any chance of a shortage of bad research in the future.

 

And I suspect it’s some kind of pathetic ‘etiquette’ everyone is forced to observe and doesn’t either mind or see the utter harmfulness of it because they are allowed to get on with the bit that matters to them

you watch it even in good people and I’ve had to tiptoe myself even with good medical professionals where you have to say the pathetic thing of ‘I’m sure they meant no harm, or just didn’t realise’ which is nonsense when after a few months anyone involved had a massive moral dilemma of this is destroying the person you are treating forever ‘but it’s awkward if you stop cos you might disgruntle someone’ so it’s callous indifference of our lives being worth so much less that it’s just about sensitivity of speaking truth.

then everyone gets used to that as it’s a norm of ‘nice’ rather than bigotry and even we get told we aren’t being nice if we refuse to bigot ourselves by bowing to this ‘etiquette’

I suspect that this exists says everything about the personalities of the original people behind it and their reaction to power.

I still find it gobsmacking when you think of the married couple element at the top of the two big power bases at one point everyone being forced to pretend ‘oh of course it’s fine they never let that be an issue’ which I thinks another emperors new clothes they all had to toe the line on for example

for all the reasons people might keep their own name after marrying (which I have no issue with) it’s not a norm in gp circles as much as it is in academia or maybe surgical world and there are plenty of ways people make it clear everyone knows they are married ie it’s just about not splitting your literature in half not concealing that relationship. I don’t get the impression it is allowed to ever be a discussion point at all even when it has been brought up in the past (remember a newspaper article with whole family and it being closed down with a one liner implying it very much wasn’t an issue - which isn’t the same as not having the same views )


That one’s an interesting bellwether on culture too as to how free people feel to mention certain things or have their own views

 

The paper:

"Muscle weakness post-COVID: a practical guide for primary care"
https://bjgp.org/content/74/749/573