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Just a reminder that lots of us on here are not in the UK or the US. As I understand it, CFS is the dominant name that appears on almost everybody's diagnosis, whatever country you're from. Its not a special US thing. It's certainly the name I was given when diagnosed decades ago in Australia...

I've seen a lot of discussions of "sickness behaviour" that slide into the psychosomatic as well. The concept is commonly misused to justify all sorts of claims about the "function" of behaving like a sick person - and not just its evolutionary function, but also its "function for the...

:rofl:

Yes, magical thinking is WAY less dangerous than magical thinking dressed up in an artificial science suit.

I totally agree that people should not confound tiredness during a tough period or a stressful job with ME/CFS. And I do agree that the CFS label increases the chances of this happening amongst patients - it leads to people incorrectly concluding they have this disease when in fact they are just...

@richie, in case this is useful to you in the future: If you want to quote someone, you type this text at the beginning of the quoted string: And then this text at the end of the string: Sorry for misreading your point about allopecia!

Not at all off-topic, @Mithriel. I'm not as confident of this as you. I think its part of the human condition to seek events in our history that co-occured with the onset a terrible illness. For people that live a life with the usual pressures and ups and downs, its very likely they would have...

Hi @richie, thanks for engaging. My point here is that the whole "mind and body are connected" claim is based on the notion that they are somehow separate entities that "talk to each other" in some unspecified manner. I was pointing out that this type of claim does not make a lot of sense when...

What I really don't understand is, why do these people just dig themselves in deeper, lash out at their critics, when it would be so easy to apologise? "Apologies for the confusion, I suggested the other day that exercise is good for all medical problems. It is more accurate to say that...

Nice find, @rvallee. Nice to see too that it seems to be coming from someone with no interests at all, neither BPS proponent nor patient. which is a positive sign. This idea of threaded papers that they mention in the article is new to me - that any clinical trial should be automatically linked...

Sure, @Sarah94. Keith Laws has been interested for a while in whether CBT in particular has any benefits for people with schizophrenia. He argues hat most studies citing positive evidence have not had an adequate control arm, and when you select out those with a proper control arm, there is no...

There it is again. The use of the term "mind-body dualism" as a way of impugning those who believe any disease cannot be made better by thinking the right thoughts. Apparently, that's how these folks define "mind-body dualism" in our current, post-truth world. 1. Aren't you AWARE that the mind...

This post has been copied and the following discussion moved from this thread: Paul Garner on Long Covid and ME/CFS. BMJ articles. There it is again. The use of the term "mind-body dualism" as a way of impugning those who believe any disease cannot be made better by thinking the right...

Excellent find, @TiredSam!

So glad you asked, @mango! What an offensive attempt to co-opt scientific ideas to justify absolute quackery and woo! First they say you can have "bodily symptoms" without observable physical pathology. Which tells us nothing more than the fact that disease explanations are not perfect (and...

Yes this! Like childbirth, the experience of illness is so quickly lost and so hard to recall once we feel better... I've always had a extreme relapsing-remitting pattern, a cyclic series of forgetting-then-remembering events. Not just the awfulness of the physical sensations, but the whole...

NOT what Pavlov has shown at all. Pavlov showed that dogs can salivate to the sound of a bell when the bell is usually paired with food. He had nothing to say about "dysfunctional autonomic tracks in the brain", nor about dysfunctionality at all. Pavlov considered learning to be a normal and...

Yes, un peu Marie Antoinette: "There is simply nothing that isn't made better by having one's own personal trainer" Honestly, without my personal trainer, I don't know HOW I would have gotten by...

Watch out, NZ, looks like the use of wastebasket pseudopsychological diagnoses might be on the rise here...

Actually @rvallee, its even worse than that. This is another complete arse-about-face argument: So people with RA have a lot of pain and fatigability, and probably also have "anhedonia" according to many self-report schemes (because they no longer get the pleasure out of some activities that...