Wired Magazine: The Painful Truth About Long Covid by Alan Levinovitz, 2026

[MrMagoo]

If I can't make a point without writing several paragraphs then you find it unconvincing? Unfortunately some points take longer than a bumper sticker to make! I'll do my best to be as succinct as possible.

My point is that the broader community that both has and advocates for these often overlapping diagnoses has created socio-cultural conditions that make it very hard for clinicians, scientists, and the general public to engage in dispassionate, objective research or discussion. I bring up the other conditions because my argument in the WIRED piece is about a broader socio-cultural context, where validating diagnoses is of paramount importance, and criticizing them (or patients' experiences of them) is broadly taboo.

Yeah, Ihave Me

If I can't make a point without writing several paragraphs then you find it unconvincing? Unfortunately some points take longer than a bumper sticker to make! I'll do my best to be as succinct as possible.

My point is that the broader community that both has and advocates for these often overlapping diagnoses has created socio-cultural conditions that make it very hard for clinicians, scientists, and the general public to engage in dispassionate, objective research or discussion. I bring up the other conditions because my argument in the WIRED piece is about a broader socio-cultural context, where validating diagnoses is of paramount importance, and criticizing them (or patients' experiences of them) is broadly taboo.

Oh, so you’re blaming people with conditions for a) creating social media and b) using it, cool cool. See, I made your point in a sentence.

Is the community also to blame when the same is applied to the equivalent of, for example
- left wing politicians in politics
- right wing politicians in politics

Is the social-cultural context you propose is worthy of much greater discussion across other medical conditions and wider contexts? People disagree. People don’t like it when, others disagree with them. We should look into it.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

My point is that the broader community that both has and advocates for these often overlapping diagnoses has created socio-cultural conditions that make it very hard for clinicians, scientists, and the general public to engage in dispassionate, objective research or discussion. I bring up the other conditions because my argument in the WIRED piece is about a broader socio-cultural context, where validating diagnoses is of paramount importance, and criticizing them (or patients' experiences of them) is broadly taboo.

I rather get the impression that you are sealed in a North American monetised socio-political cocoon on this, @Learningandlistening. It is not difficult to engage in dispassionate objective research and discussion. We have been having it here for a decade and that has filtered right the way through the ME/CFS research community (maybe that is how you got here). Our members have been involved in major scientific projects with important results. I don't get the impression you have a realistic perspective on this issue at all.

There is a lot of noise about, because the old folklore is taking a battering as the real science develops, but on the eastern shores of the Atlantic people tend to take that in their stride .

 

[Trish]

I hope, @Learningandlistening, you will take time to reflect on the enormous harm an article like yours may cause to many very sick and even dying people. What right have you to write such a scientifically unsound article that can impact many lives?

Take a look at the evidence we put to Cochrane about harms from exercise treatment for ME/CFS.
https://s4me.info/threads/s4me-2023...cfs-exercise-therapy-review.34973/post-521800

Far from being silenced, promoters or CBT/GET, brain retraining, the Lightning Process and other similar inevidenced psychobehavioural treatments for ME/CFS have held sway over much of the media in the UK for decades. People have made lucrative careers out of these treatments. They love promoting 'recovery stories' as if they were evidence of efficacy of a threatment. They are not. For that we need blinded controlled clinical trials.

Just look at what happened with Rituximab. Fluge and Mella did open label preliminary trials that looked promising. Some people improved or recovered. Yet they actively discouraged anyone with ME/CFS from trying Rituximab until they had done a large blinded controlled trial. It was just as well they did, as it turned out to be no better than placebo. We need to hold brain retraining to the same high standards. Where is the clinical trial evidence for brain retraining for ME/CFS?

You seem fond of believing anecdotes over scientific evidence, so can I persuade you to read the anecdotes in these documents, keeping in mind that any drug treatment that had such negative effects would not get FDA approval.
https://lp-fortellinger.no/en/lp-stories/
https://www.meassociation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/NICE-Patient-Survey-Outcomes-CBT-and-GET-Oxford-Brookes-Full-Report-03.04.19.p

 

[Learningandlistening]

Says you on the forum that tries to engage in discussions about research, while refusing to engage in the discussion.

No, the piece is about mind-body woo, which gets a lot of backlash because it’s complete nonsense that’s being used to abuse patients, among other things. But you don’t want to discuss the merits of the thing that is getting pushback.

I think this is one of the best forums for research discussion, and I said so in my post. The reason I can't reply to everything is that I have to do work, and attend to my family, and can't spend all day responding, although I wish I could! But as for the merits of the thing getting pushback — mind-body approaches — I say everything I wanted to say in the piece. If some people are having remarkable one-day turnarounds ("book cures" as they call them), then it shows me that in at least their cases, some etiological hypotheses MUST be wrong. Can't be mitochondrial dysfunction, or tissue damage, for example. And if some people are spontaneously remitting from severe LC, that tells us something too. Nowhere in the piece do I say these interventions work. My argument simply isn't about that! It's about the *context* of LC research in general. And my argument is that context makes it very, very hard to study something like exercise and self-report of PEM (which is also a big part of the piece), or "mind-body" interventions, which, like dietary interventions, aren't as amenable to blinded trials (I also mention this in the piece).

That's it. The vast majority of people, Hausmann included, who are engaging with the piece just aren't engaging with the argument. It is not a piece that argues mind-body therapies work, or don't work. It is a piece that argues the *validity* and *reality* and *legitimacy* of physiological symptoms, in the context of ME/CFS and LC, is tied directly to their not being amenable to mind-body interventions. It also argues that the history of PACE makes it very difficult to study other more responsible forms of gradual exercise, or the disjunct between self-report of PEM and what happens in trials, or between self-report of neurological symptoms and what shows up in neuropsych batteries. That's the argument!

 

[V.R.T.]

@Learningandlistening I am one of the many people who was permanently harmed by the sort of approach you promote in the article. I believed my doctors, I put all my effort into getting better, and instead I went from mild to severe. On this forum there are many others like me. You can find our stories all over the internet. NICE found our accounts of deterioration credible in their 2021 guideline process. People like you ignore and dismiss them because it's inconvenient.

I cannot put into words what it is like to believe you are making yourself better and reclaiming your life only to slide from a state where you still have a reduced but still often rewarding life into one where you need daily care for basics like getting food and washing. And to remain that way for five years.

If you want to understand why people who write articles like yours come for so much flack from the MECFS community, read our accounts of deterioration and permanent worsened symptoms. LISTEN. Instead of peddling silly fantasies about how this can all be fixed with a bit of magical thinking and then complaining when you're rightly told its utter bullshit.

Read the threads here on the PACE trial and it's offshoots. Read on here about the flaws with brain retraining, lightening process etc. Read about what happened to Maeve Boothby O Neill and others like her. Read what happened to all the people on here and elsewhere who gave this bullshit their all and then ended up completely crippled as a result.

Curently you are allowing yourself to be used as a useful idiot for a cadre of corrupt feckless psych researchers and scam artists who don't give a flying fuck about good research or patients or anything but protecting their professional reputations and enriching themselves. The article you have written will cause harm to a vunerable patient population. I suggest you take a long hard look in the mirror and then do better.

 

[Learningandlistening]

I hope, @Learningandlistening, you will take time to reflect on the enormous harm an article like yours may cause to many very sick and even dying people. What right have you to write such a scientifically unsound article that can impact many lives?

Take a look at the evidence we put to Cochrane about harms from exercise treatment for ME/CFS.
https://s4me.info/threads/s4me-2023...cfs-exercise-therapy-review.34973/post-521800

Far from being silenced, promoters or CBT/GET, brain retraining, the Lightning Process and other similar inevidenced psychobehavioural treatments for ME/CFS have held sway over much of the media in the UK for decades. People have made lucrative careers out of these treatments. They love promoting 'recovery stories' as if they were evidence of efficacy of a threatment. They are not. For that we need blinded controlled clinical trials.

Just look at what happened with Rituximab. Fluge and Mella did open label preliminary trials that looked promising. Some people improved or recovered. Yet they actively discouraged anyone with ME/CFS from trying Rituximab until they had done a large blinded controlled trial. It was just as well they did, as it turned out to be no better than placebo. We need to hold brain retraining to the same high standards. Where is the clinical trial evidence for brain retraining for ME/CFS?

You seem fond of believing anecdotes over scientific evidence, so can I persuade you to read the anecdotes in these documents, keeping in mind that any drug treatment that had such negative effects would not get FDA approval.
https://lp-fortellinger.no/en/lp-stories/
https://www.meassociation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/NICE-Patient-Survey-Outcomes-CBT-and-GET-Oxford-Brookes-Full-Report-03.04.19.p

With all due respect, I don't think you have read the piece. I link to those stories IN THE PIECE, and describe those patients' experiences. I'm extremely familiar with the history, with this forum, and with the research. None of this is new to me.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

My point is that scientific inquiry is driven by socio-cultural factors.

Well of course it is. But you just get on with the job.

And in the case of long Covid, as in hEDS and MCAS, the broader context in which scientific inquiry is taking place does not conduce to good science.

I am still unclear why you are bundling these together. Long Covid is a meaningful but much too ill-defined concept. There is a huge amount of bad research that has not taken into account how ill-defined it is but there is research in the pipeline that will be better. The difference largely reflects the quality of the investigators. hEDS and MCAS are incoherent concepts. They don't even deserve thinking about other than as misinformation that fringe physicians use to manipulate patients' needs. The equivalent of astrology if you like.

 

[MrMagoo]

Anyway @Learningandlistening I'm sure you will have people who agree with your article, as well as a lot of people who don’t (as you are aware) If you were hoping to “bring people with/to your idea” in the article and it hasn’t worked, have a think on why that is.

I shan’t dedicate my limited time to engaging with it further as I don't want to, you either want to understand or you don’t, I can’t do that for you, and you can do it for yourself by reading anyhoo.

 

[Learningandlistening]

@Learningandlistening I am one of the many people who was permanently harmed by the sort of approach you promote in the article. I believed my doctors, I put all my effort into getting better, and instead I went from mild to severe. On this forum there are many others like me. You can find our stories all over the internet. NICE found our accounts of deterioration credible in their 2021 guideline process. People like you ignore and dismiss them because it's inconvenient.

I cannot put into words what it is like to believe you are making yourself better and reclaiming your life only to slide from a state where you still have a reduced but still often rewarding life into one where you need daily care for basics like getting food and washing. And to remain that way for five years.

If you want to understand why people who write articles like yours come for so much flack from the MECFS community, read our accounts of deterioration and permanent worsened symptoms. LISTEN. Instead of peddling silly fantasies about how this can all be fixed with a bit of magical thinking and then complaining when you're rightly told its utter bullshit.

Read the threads here on the PACE trial and it's offshoots. Read on here about the flaws with brain retraining, lightening process etc. Read about what happened to Maeve Boothby O Neill and others like her. Read what happened to all the people on here and elsewhere who gave this bullshit their all and then ended up completely crippled as a result.

Curently you are allowing yourself to be l a useful idiot for a cadre of corrupt feckless psych researchers and scam artists who don't give a flying fuck about good research or patients or anything but protecting their professional reputations and enriching themselves. The article you have written will cause harm to a vunerable patient population. I suggest you take a long hard

Well of course it is. But you just get on with the job.


I am still unclear why you are bundling these together. Long Covid is a meaningful but much too ill-defined concept. There is a huge amount of bad research that has not taken into account how ill-defined it is but there is research in the pipeline that will be better. The difference largely reflects the quality of the investigators. hEDS and MCAS are incoherent concepts. They don't even deserve thinking about other than as misinformation that fringe physicians use to manipulate patients' needs. The equivalent of astrology if you like.

Jonathan, if you think hEDS is an incoherent concept, and no one in the medical community accepts it, I have bad news. Many, many people in the medical community accept it. UVA Medical School, just down the road from me, is opening a new research center for EDS...which will be focusing on trying to figure out the genetics of hEDS. A documentary was just released about EDS that focuses largely on hEDS, and one of the leading EDS researchers is on board with hEDS as a valid clinical entity. I'm afraid you're just unfamiliar with the current status of hEDS in the medical world!

 

[MrMagoo]

I think this is one of the best forums for research discussion, and I said so in my post. The reason I can't reply to everything is that I have to do work, and attend to my family, and can't spend all day responding, although I wish I could! But as for the merits of the thing getting pushback — mind-body approaches — I say everything I wanted to say in the piece. If some people are having remarkable one-day turnarounds ("book cures" as they call them), then it shows me that in at least their cases, some etiological hypotheses MUST be wrong.

why? Source?
this is just your opinion, it’s not scientific. Even I know that and I’m a humanities background.
Ok now I’m muting this thread.

 

[EndME]

Hi @Learningandlistening, thank you for joining the discussion.

Naturally there is a lot of fringe science that should be best put to bed that cannot be critiqued on places like Twitter precisely because popularity, not content, dominates the discourse. That seems to be the intended nature of Twitter.

As you yourself have brought up things are different on S4ME precisely because people will write long explanations explaining why certain concepts, be it microclots, hEDS or MCAS are dubious without in anyway being attacked. There will be a discussion where the evidence is aired out, often discussing why “proven abnormalities” are no such thing.

Naturally, your article makes some of these points. The nonsensical prevalence estimates for Long-Covid are just a reflection of nonsensical studies and nonsensical definitions of Long-Covid that don’t benefit anybody, expect maybe the people publishing this work and the publishers. But all of this is fairly trivial and has been discussed ad nauseam. So have all the poor quality studies on brain retraining, and CBT trials that are laughable at best, with references to neuroplasticity that only mock any rigorous science. How often do we still have to discuss PACE, which basic problems have not been discussed for example in the expert testimonies?

I can understand that you worry that the history of the PACE trial makes it so that other BPS interventions (or whichever name you prefer) cannot be studied. I can assure you that is not the case. There have been numerous of such studies since and thousands of patients undergoing such interventions, the problem is that those involved in the studies apparently don’t even know how to run well conducted studies to begin with, or more precisely they are willing to ignore rigor if it favours their own beliefs. That is not very different to mentioning unreliable accounts of improvements on LDN and then countering this with equally unreliable accounts of “mind-body” therapies. All a bit laughable don’t you think?

I’m sure you will receive many replies on your piece that completely missed the mark, probably the vast majority, but was the piece any better? Why counter bad science with bad science?

 

[Utsikt]

I think this is one of the best forums for research discussion, and I said so in my post. The reason I can't reply to everything is that I have to do work, and attend to my family, and can't spend all day responding, although I wish I could!

That’s very different from what you said initially.

But as for the merits of the thing getting pushback — mind-body approaches — I say everything I wanted to say in the piece. If some people are having remarkable one-day turnarounds ("book cures" as they call them), then it shows me that in at least their cases, some etiological hypotheses MUST be wrong. Can't be mitochondrial dysfunction, or tissue damage, for example. And if some people are spontaneously remitting from severe LC, that tells us something too.

Most diseases have people that get a lot better spontaneously. That says nothing about how the diseases work, except for that they are probably not degenerative.

It's about the *context* of LC research in general. And my argument is that context makes it very, very hard to study something like exercise and self-report of PEM (which is also a big part of the piece), or "mind-body" interventions, which, like dietary interventions, aren't as amenable to blinded trials (I also mention this in the piece).

It’s really not difficult. Just stay away from the woo and present your findings neutrally.

The vast majority of people, Hausmann included, who are engaging with the piece just aren't engaging with the argument.

You’ve given a lot of space to mind-body woo and made it appear legitimate. It’s a bit like writing an article about climate change, propping it full with the perspectives of climate deniers, and then being surprised that people react to you featuring climate denial so prominently without stating very clearly that those perspective are completely unfounded.

It is not a piece that argues mind-body therapies work, or don't work. It is a piece that argues the *validity* and *reality* and *legitimacy* of physiological symptoms, in the context of ME/CFS and LC, is tied directly to their not being amenable to mind-body interventions.

What do you mean by «validity»? As perceived by whom?

It also argues that the history of PACE makes it very difficult to study other more responsible forms of gradual exercise, or the disjunct between self-report of PEM and what happens in trials, or between self-report of neurological symptoms and what shows up in neuropsych batteries. That's the argument!

There are no «more responsible» forms of exercise for someone with PEM.

We discuss all of those disjuncts here all the time.

And you can’t be «extremely familiar» with the research if you think it’s difficult to do BPS research on any of these conditions. Those trials appear to have unlimited funding and new papers are posted here pretty much every day. The BPS folks still like to play the victims all the time.

The only difficulty here is getting good biomed studies funded. Just look at ResetME that’s purely funded by patient donations while Wyller got yet another 25M NOK for his brain retraining trial #3 while lying about negative results being positive in the grant application.

 

[EndME]

In regards to your view on recovery and interventions and the quote from the text:

Believing patients, all patients, means that mind-body therapies may work in some cases of long Covid, even severe ones. (Dismissing those therapies as the “placebo effect” is, ironically, to reaffirm their effectiveness: The placebo effect is just a pejorative term for the power of the mind to produce symptom improvements.)

This clearly does not follow when an illness allows for natural recovery.

 

[Learningandlistening]

Hi @Learningandlistening, thank you for joining the discussion.

Naturally there is a lot of fringe science that should be best put to bed that cannot be critiqued on places like Twitter precisely because polarity, not content, dominates the discourse. That seems to be the intended nature on Twitter.

As you yourself have brought up things are different on S4ME precisely because people will write long explanations explaining why certain concepts, be it microclots, hEDS or MCAS are dubious without in anyway being attacked. There will be a discussion where the evidence is aired out often, often discussing why “proven abnormalities” are no such thing.

Naturally, your article makes some of these points. The nonsensical prevalence estimates for Long-Covid are just a reflection of nonsensical studies and nonsensical definitions of Long-Covid that don’t benefit anybody, expect maybe the people publishing this work and the publishers. But all of this is fairly trivial and has been discussed ad nauseam. So have all the poor quality studies on brain retraining, and CBT trials that are laughable at best, with references to neuroplasticity that only mock any rigorous science. How often do we still have to discuss PACE, which basic problems have not been discussed for example in the expert testimonies?

I can understand that you worry that the history of the PACE trial makes it so that other BPS interventions (or whichever name you prefer) cannot be studied. I can assure you that is not the case. There have been numerous of such studies since and thousands of patients undergoing such interventions, the problem is that those involved in the studies apparently don’t even know how to run well conducted studies to begin with, or more precisely they are willing to ignore rigor if it favours their own beliefs. That is not very different to mentioning unreliable accounts of improvements on LDN and then countering this with equally unreliable accounts of “mind-body” therapies. All a bit laughable don’t you think?

I’m sure you will receive many replies on your piece that completely missed the mark, probably the vast majority, but was the piece any better? Why counter bad science with bad science?

Appreciate this thoughtful reply. I have to go now, and am logging off for the rest of the week/weekend, but a few quick points. First, I think studies of BPS interventions are simply very difficult to do, for the same reason that studies of any intervention that might depend on therapeutic alliance are very difficult to do. Consider, as a parallel, someone who joins a lifestyle community and manages to lose a fair amount of weight with diet and exercise. They report that being in this community helped them lose weight. They had tried other communities in the past, but those didn't work. Can you study this "intervention"? Sort of, but not with a blinded trial, obviously. And the further we get from the community, the alliance with the coach, the timing of joining the community, whatever, the harder it is to study.

With regards to LDN (or metformin, or craniocervical surgery, or whatever), I'd make two points: The first is that these kinds of interventions are more amenable to study than the BPS interventions. The second is that *generally* they are treated as having more promise, by the broader communities, because they are seen to validate a purely organic (I hate these terms, but fine) symptom etiology. Recovery stories are also treated more gently by the broader community.

Lastly, as you all know here, long Covid is far too vague. But trying to separate out the subpopulation that really does experience serious PEM (as opposed to self-report) or really does have objective neurological impairment (as opposed to self-report) is not something scientists are especially interested in doing, nor is it something that patient advocates want to see happen. I discuss this in my brief review of the RECOVER trial, in the piece. That's a bad thing, and it makes it hard to know what's going on, with BPS interventions, with long Covid prevalence, with PEM, with...well, with anything.

 

[Hoopoe]

With regards to LDN (or metformin, or craniocervical surgery, or whatever), I'd make two points: The first is that these kinds of interventions are more amenable to study than the BPS interventions. The second is that *generally* they are treated as having more promise, by the broader communities, because they are seen to validate a purely organic (I hate these terms, but fine) symptom etiology.

Have you considered the possibility that patients don't attribute high credibility to BPS interventions for valid reasons?

Keep in mind that patients have a lot of lived experience with how their illness responds or does not respond to outside events and their own mental state. We observe all these factors every day.

To give you a concrete example: it will be difficult to persuade a patient that increasing activity with a positive attitude and expectations will prevent symptom worsenig when the patient knows from repeated experiences that this is false.

Depictions of exotic animals in medieval Europ were painted by people who had never seen a lion or a camel and only a faint idea of what they truly looked like, based on hearsay. The psychosomatic models are bit like that.

 

[Concentric_Spiral]

And if some people are spontaneously remitting from severe LC, that tells us something too.

Aren't there cases of spontaneous remission from many severe disorders?

 

[Trish]

That's it. The vast majority of people, Hausmann included, who are engaging with the piece just aren't engaging with the argument. It is not a piece that argues mind-body therapies work, or don't work. It is a piece that argues the *validity* and *reality* and *legitimacy* of physiological symptoms, in the context of ME/CFS and LC, is tied directly to their not being amenable to mind-body interventions. It also argues that the history of PACE makes it very difficult to study other more responsible forms of gradual exercise, or the disjunct between self-report of PEM and what happens in trials, or between self-report of neurological symptoms and what shows up in neuropsych batteries. That's the argument!

I wonder who you have been listening to. Almost every week it seems we see yet another poorly conducted trial of exercise or psych therapies for Long Covid. It's amazing how many teams seriously think they are doing new and groundbreaking clinical trials of yet another variation of CBT or GET, and get funding for them. And the result is always the same. Small and temporary upticks on questionnaires, and no clinically significant long term benefit.

And your article, by foregrounding brain training anecdotes does leave a lasting impression that you think psychobehavioural treatments work and are promoting them.

Your argument that ME/CFS and Long covid can't be biomedical on the ground that if they were psychobehavioral treatments wouldn't work is fatuous. Where is the clinical trial evidence that they do work? Anecdotes of recovery are not evidence in any scientifically valid way. 35 years of endless rinse and repeat variations on CBT/GET failed and many got sicker.

If you're going on anecdotes, how about the power of prayer to cure cancer as some claim. Should their anecdotes be interpreted to mean cancer can't be biological?

ME/CFS has always been known to have some spontaneous recoveries, the rate being highest in the early couple of years and in young people. Some people choose to attribute that recovery to whatever treatment or behavior change they were trying at the time. Do you think we should pay equal attention to people who say their recovery was caused by homeopathy or ear seeds or spinach juice?

 

[Learningandlistening]

Have you considered the possibility that patients don't attribute high credibility to BPS interventions for valid reasons?

Keep in mind that patients have a lot of lived experience with how their illness responds or does not respond to outside events and their own mental state. We observe all these factors every day.

To give you a concrete example: it will be difficult to persuade a patient that increasing activity with a positive attitude and expectations will prevent symptom worsenig when the patient knows from repeated experiences that this is false. It's a bit like depictions of exotic animals in medieval Europe: they were painted by people who had never seen a lion or a camel and only a faint idea of what they truly looked like.

If we're going to give credence to patients' lived experience of how their illness responds or doesn't respond, then shouldn't we give credence to the lived experiences of patients — like Larson and Lupi in my piece, and thousands of others — who tried tons of things, are very familiar with how their illness responds or does not, and then finally find relief through some BPS intervention? And they're sure it's right because they can feel it? Or do we reserve disdain, skepticism, and disbelief for them, but keep a more open mind to the ones who claim it was LDN, or metformin, or their second craniocervical surgery that led to their recovery?

 

[Utsikt]

First, I think studies of BPS interventions are simply very difficult to do, for the same reason that studies of any intervention that might depend on therapeutic alliance are very difficult to do.

Not really. Find objective outcomes that can be used as proxies for health and that aren’t circular to the intervention (like fitness as a measurement of health in a rehab study), and ditch the terrible questionnaires.

When the BPS trials partially did this for ME/CFS, they found that it doesn’t work. When this is done for BPS in other areas, it usually finds that it doesn’t work.

But trying to separate out the subpopulation that really does experience serious PEM (as opposed to self-report) or really does have objective neurological impairment (as opposed to self-report) is not something scientists are especially interested in doing, nor is it something that patient advocates want to see happen.

I’ve spoken to plenty of scientists here that are very interested in finding ways to better study all aspects of ME/CFS or LC.

And the distinction you’re making between «objective» and «subjective» is fallacious. Everything is objective as in «biological» or «physical», it’s just a matter of what we can measure with current technology.

I very clearly have neurological issues even though most of them will not show up on tests. And those issues are caused exclusively by biology.

But perhaps you’re not familiar with how the dualistic mind-body paradigm is wholly incompatible with physics as we understand it?

 

[Utsikt]

If we're going to give credence to patients' lived experience of how their illness responds or doesn't respond, then shouldn't we give credence to the lived experiences of patients — like Larson and Lupi in my piece, and thousands of others — who tried tons of things, are very familiar with how their illness responds or does not, and then finally find relief through some BPS intervention? And they're sure it's right because they can feel it? Or do we reserve disdain, skepticism, and disbelief for them, but keep a more open mind to the ones who claim it was LDN, or metformin, or their second craniocervical surgery that led to their recovery?

It seems like you’re confusing trusting observations with trusting interpretations about causality based on personal experiences. This is a very frequently discussed topic here, but you must have missed it.