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I got PIP points for my vision so it must be bad :) I developed a bad phobia about being in a car, especially busy roads with roundabouts. Not good when we had to travel though a city road with 17 roundabouts to go see my grandchildren. Then it dawned on me the problem was that I cannot see...

I am dubious about the positive signs. If there are consistent neurological signs, that says nothing about why they are happening and certainly does not prove they are caused by psychological processes. A book on diagnosis says that the Hoover sign can give a positive result in MS because the...

I agree with Sean. If patients are not pretending to have symptoms something is affecting the neurological process so there is always a neurological problem. Diagnosis is something that medics do using a set of historical formula. For ideological reasons a group of doctors have decided that...

I read an article in the MS society magazine that was originally published in the RA society magazine (with me!) It was about fatigue and was very interesting. They were definitely talking about fatigue as lay people think about it. Basically they felt that it was just so difficult to do...

The point is that we do not need a randomised controlled trial to do an initial sort of TB, lung cancer and asthma. A careful history of each patient showed they had different diseases so they were accepted as different. The emphasis on fatigue in ME was done for ideological reasons. The...

Sound bite medicine. It sounds good until you try to think what it really means ... wait, it means we are full of bugs - a viral illness, yay!

The biggest problem is where ME is seen as a disease of fatigue since fatigue is common to most disease. Using patients with only 6 months of fatigue in common is never going to get any answers for anything except the cause of fatigue and that is presuming that all fatigue springs form the same...

No, I am agreeing with you, you know about joints. It is just that if no one is looking for the correct diagnosis people will latch onto that sort of thing because it is all they can get. If someone is sick and they are told it is because they have a disturbance of their chakras they will feel...

It is a bit of a Catch-22 situation. No one is examining these disorders properly so patients have to try to diagnose themselves or turn to private practitioners who are off the mainstream. Armed with answers from these sources patients try to tell mainstream doctors there really is something...

So there does not have to be incentives to illness just "potential" incentives for them to assume there is a conscious (and rational!) decision to malinger. That will be a benefit worth a pittance compared to salary in a job you have struggled to get.

I find it very hard to describe this, even when it is happening I have tried to find words but to no avail. When I am particularly exhausted, usually because of lots of sensory input such as my grandchildren moving, shouting, playing arguing, tv on, all talking to me at once - you get the...

I can't understand the scoring for the questions. If you get 5 for not true "I feel fit!" but then you score 1 for true "Physically I can do very little" then you get the same score if you are an athlete as if you have ME. Am I missing something or is this worse than the Chalder scale?

I have found I can do something strenuous (for me!) for a minute or so without payback but small things repeated without rest cause damage. I worked myself to immobility by 10 minutes of fiddling with the control on a pair of headphones, not able to talk or respond in any way for a good while...

The advice to go to the gym is wrong on so many levels they need stated. The general idea that exercise is good for everyone and exercise is medicine is a very middle class thing if it is allowed to say that. Humans evolved to be active. Exercise, doing activities for their own sake, is a very...

This is from Critical Theory ideas. I have been reading about this and seen things which explain some of the psych ideas. Basically science and experiment leading to answers is seen as a Western European idea, not something related to reality because all science has to be interpreted through...

They will go in fear of your pen!

It is worse when you realise they explicitly say that FND is the new name for hysteria. So all those WW1 soldiers who were said to have hysteria rather than bombardment brain injuries now have ... hysteria! Stone has written a paper admiring the likes of Beard and Freud and the rest and said...

Workwell things will be refined as we have more knowledge but they are the best attempt we have so far. At the very least they offer suggestions on things that can help and give us some tools for helping ourselves.

Exactly. The important thing about the 2 day tests is the drop on the second day. Any differences on the first are interesting, but it the inability to recover that is the big sign of pathology.

I don't know about acute infection but we just accepted that some people would be very ill, even to being bedbound for months then gradually get better. In a similar way, prolonged giardiasis is being called ME but it can be prolonged without becoming ME. A friend had a few years with this but...