UK - NHS England online tool and clinics for long Covid.

I don't disagree (not that you suggested I did) but when all we see is this explanation it needs to be balanced by recognition of the more prominent alternative.

In my mind explaining the physiological underpinnings of what's happening to someone can actual go a way to alleviating some anxiety. Concern for the future will still be there but it's often when things are happening to us and we haven't a clue that creates a space for more anxiety. So just treating people as if it's some general anxiety issue doesn't seem reasonable to me.

Maybe I'm misreading the writers intent.

 

Sorry, just one other thought on the issue of anxiety.

IMO it's not all the same thing. Not just the difference between psychological and physiological but in the psychological arena there is acute anxiety -- I represent this in my mind as (over the top image) hands furiously flapping and person hyperventilating.

And then there is that long slow anxiety. And that we all share to some degree as in we're all mortal and we will all die one day. This affects how we live even when not directly thinking about it. Some people will have more difficulty dealing with long-term concerns of ill health for a whole host of reasons some of them very concrete (and amenable to change just not the CBT sort).

These things need to be recognised teased apart and dealt with accordingly. I know it's hard for those asked to provide a view to the media to give anything but simplistic answers in response but somewhere along the way it has to be recognised that what is said in the media isn't the whole story and the whole story needs to be aired/discussed somehow, somewhere.

We are being drowned in superficial explanations for everything.

I know I do bang on about this stuff . . .

 

If anyone wondered whether our BPS overlords are behind it, of course they are behind it. Very telling that they are not citing their own work on ME, despite it being the bulk of their career. I don't see how identical work with MS is any more valid, but it sure helps with the narrative of how they have good evidence for this, as long as you don't actually look at the evidence.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1522203143362207745

 

Many Long Covid clinics are just as awful as the "fatigue" clinics. They're truly making their parents proud, achieve the same level of being offensively wrong.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1526966372479148033

 

It doesn't even make sense when I saw a respiratory nurse at Post Covid clinic who mainly looked at my breathing and said it was physically disordered. What is being decided for us all to receive differing levels of care?

https://twitter.com/user/status/1526966372479148033

 

Don't think we've seen glimpses at the GET program in the app before. Apparently they won't tell the patients what's in it before they agree to use it.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1532721653792350208


And they seem to know they're not supposed to do GET, but doing it anyway and calling it something else is fine. So they are clearly doing something they know they shouldn't do and think using a different name is all good because whoever holds them accountable don't care. Hard to find a better example of how enforcement is 99% of what having rules is about. Bad faith execution of a rule is a clear sign of systemic dysfunction.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1532765456163119107

 

Yes it seems clear almost right across the board with ME/CFS clinics as well as wth LC, that they believe the reasons GET has been de-recommended are spurious....

so they believe they are actually supposed to be doing it, but not to be seen to be doing it

 

If anyone is wondering whether the healthcare system that gave birth to this awful dystopian nightmare has learned anything out of destroying millions of lives when facing the biggest event of its kind in history? Nope. Not a damn thing, still all in with the deconditioning quackery. Evidence is sadly and clearly irrelevant in evidence-based medicine, it's all perception and self-interest.

Medicine is every bit as much incapable of telling uncomfortable truths as any political system, it's just baked in the system that once a lie is established and reputations are tied to it, it must be preserved at all costs, no matter how much harm it causes. So much for a so-called "oath".

https://twitter.com/user/status/1550492671285788673

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1550492687836618752


they should think themselves lucky; the NHS website pages for ME/CFS don't even mention PEM!

 

Should we be surprised at the attitude of the NHS ,given what we know of the views of the NHS Clinical Director for Mental Health's about the new NICE guideline? Was it not he who suggested that it might be "pulled altogether"?

 

Plausible deniability only works so long as the denials remain ... plausible. Which they don't for very long.