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The paperback version is not sold any more, and the reviews were there. When you search bokus.com, you now only find the audio version and the e-book. However, if you want to read the paperback reviews, the following link is still active...

Proponents of a biopsychosocial view of ME/CFS don’t respond well to criticism. Last autumn, Dr. Jörgen Malmquist published a book on ME/CFS in Swedish. It was available at the website bokus.com. I wrote a review; and, as it is a bad book that is full of misconceptions, the review was negative...

Thanks for bringing the report from the Royal Academy of Sciences to my attention. I am afraid that I have had a long and bad relapse in my ME/CFS. I am trying to return to work and currently work 25% from home over VPN connection. I have very limited excess energy, and cannot at the moment...

This is an important point. We shouldn't confuse preliminary findings, non-replicated papers, leads, and hypotheses with established facts and scientific consensus. Some people make that mistake in social media. It will ultimately backfire and have negative consequences for all of us. Just like...

I love it! Simply brilliant, @Brian Hughes! :thumbup:

Good question! I think that hypochondriasis does exist, although the label is often used erroneously for conditions that are not well understood. I think that behavioural and psychological factors obviously play a large role as triggers for burn out and post-traumatic stress disorder. However, I...

I have just received a copy of Jörgen Malmquist's book on ME/CFS, "Trött hela livet. Sjukdomen ME". In English: "Tired all life. The illness ME". I have just glanced through the text, but I directly noticed that it is full of straw men. He attributes weird statements to opponents, doesn't...

The so-called placebo effect is a mix of different processes, including memory bias and the desire to say what the investigators want to hear. It is difficult to establish the relative contribution of the involved processes, and I don't think it has been convincingly demonstrated that the...

Jörgen Malmquist is a former hospital doctor and also an Associate Professor ("docent"). He has published several books and several opinion pieces in the Journal of the Swedish Medical Association ("Läkartidningen"), and he has appeared in media on some occasions. I think he is fairly well...

It is an interesting paper, but I think they miss an important point. Epidemic ME was a contagious disease with unknown aetiology, although circumstantial evidence suggests it was caused by a viral infection, possibly an enterovirus. The illness had an alarming tendency to trigger the postviral...

I hate to sound negative, but I would be careful to cite this paper. The analysis is interesting and they raise some valid points, but the conclusions are not supported by the data. The relation between gamma and beta in the least-square fit will depend on the time window where the fitting is...

Thank you for highlighting this forgotten epidemic. I find it interesting, as many critics of the ME diagnosis point out that the ME epidemics disappeared after the 1990s and they imply that this shows a psychological cause. Encephalitis lethargica is a good counter example. It swept the world...

Doesn't this undermine the cognitive behavioural model for ME/CFS? The model proposes that inactivity is part of the problem, and the PACE authors have also sometimes claimed that "boom and bust" is part of the problem. If many different kinds of activity patterns can be identified in the...

There is nothing wrong with hypothesizing an illness mechanism. However, if the proposed mechanism doesn't hold up and the proposed symptoms don't define a clearly distinguishable group of patients, there is nothing that connects the patients with those symptoms. Therefore, it isn't meaningful...

Neurasthenia is an obsolete concept. George Beard introduced the term in an article in 1869. He never tried to define a group of patients described by certain signs or symptoms, but instead started with a presumed illness mechanism: nerve weakness. It was a parallell to anemia, which "is to the...

Serious rehabilitation of patients with chronic pain and fatigue?

A letter to the editor about care for patients with ME/CFS was published in the Swedish medical journal Läkartidningen yesterday. An English translation of the article has been published at ResearchGate. The English title is "Care providers use the knowledge gap about ME/CFS as an excuse for...

There is a publication from 2006, which lists the infections that are known to cause post-infectious fatigue. Influenza is on the list. There are many persons who became sick after flu-like symptoms, but where the pathogen was never identified. I therefore presume that the list is not complete...

Thank you, Tom! I think it would be unfortunate to get involved in a name battle at this point, as the underlying pathology of the illness is not known. I don't like CFS, but I have come to accept the compromise term ME/CFS. When there is more evidence and a better understanding of what is going...

I think it would be a big mistake to politicise scientific journals. Scientists will bend their results to fit the political agenda they are pursuing. There will be no checkpoints to scrutinise the political goals or to evaluate the outcome of political programs. I think it is important to...