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The Wikipedia page has a list of possible indicators of pseudoscience. It is astonishing how well it describes the characteristics of the BPS research we discuss on this forum. I have highlighted some that I think are particularly relevant. A topic, practice, or body of knowledge might...

This reminds me of how bizarre it is to present a "better than a passive control intervention" result as meaningful. It is what you would expect if the treatment did not work.

@Stuart the debate about case definitions and some other things exists because contrary to popular narratives claiming to explain the facts, it's not actually clear what the facts are. Maybe this is easier to understand with an example. One of the comments says that I'm not sure how it is...

Reduced stress tolerance could also be part of the body's response to illness, as a way of encouraging risk averse behaviour at a time when any additional problem could be disastrous.

Well I don't know of course, but adrenal insufficiency comes to mind. There could be as of yet undiscovered ways for hormonal secretions to be inadequate in response to stress. That might produce an illness where the person doesn't handle stress well and tries to manage this by avoiding...

The cause could be not stress by itself but a reduced stress tolerance that turns ordinary stress into an overly difficult problem. Claims that stress triggered some illness could be due to the illness causing a reduced stress tolerance. The illness could start at a level of severity where it...

They measure steps per day for "up to 7 days" and talk about activity patterns. This is far too short.

Some time ago I read a comment that claimed Sharpe(?) once admitted that MUS was a way to save liason psychiatry from irrelevance or something to that extent. I'm sorry I cannot be more specific and am passing on unreliable hearsay. Maybe you can find out something about this.

I think they write this in response to patients not believing that thoughts have the awesome power to cause such a severe illness as ME/CFS often is. Maybe they do in some instances but there's nothing wrong with patients saying they do not recognize themselves in the model proposed by the BPS...

I heard yesterday from a family member that works in the healthcare sector about a case where a man developed symptoms that were initially interpreted as likely to be multiple sclerosis. It turned out to be a reaction to chemicals in the beauty salon he worked. How many people have such a...

The patients with a broadly defined CFS diagnosis who are less affected are sometimes considered by other patients to be the target population of therapies like CBT and LP. The thinking is that these therapies were created for them, not for people like me. I suspect that patients who are less...

I have interacted with BPS people before and they immediately began to interpret symptoms as having a psychosocial cause without actually knowing anything about my psychosocial situation. To them the lack of medical explanation is in practice evidence that they cause must be psychosocial. The...

To clarify, PACE (according to the original protocol) does show results that are a little worse than those found to be produced by sham therapy in a previous review by none other than Wessely. Some CBT proponents might also say that it's OK that CBT is just a placebo because for this particular...

I agree there is a problem of misdiagnosis and diagnostic uncertainty but that doesn't mean the other patients necessarily have a stress and anxiety related illness. I'm also not convinced that rigid application of narrow diagnostic criteria is good. It's unclear if doing this is beneficial and...

Are MAIT cells relevant here?

What does this mean?

My nose is constantly stuffy and it's annoying.

In my experience positive mood can counteract fatigue but the problem is not initiating activities but the crash afterwards and sustaining them over a longer time. The people promoting psychological solutions seem to be unable to understand that the usual psychological factors they cite aren't...

These were all subjective outcomes, while the primary outcome (how many seizures patients had) is a lot less subjective. The secondary outcomes:

Remember that somatoform disorder requires that the person is excessively preoccupied with symptoms. That means someone else decides whether a person is worried the right amount or too much. I don't know why someone would believe that they can tell whether a person is excessively preoccupied...