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Abstract Introduction: Sexual adverse experiences such as erectile dysfunction (ED), loss of libido, and ejaculation disorders have been consistent side effects of finasteride in a maximum percentage of 15% after 1 year of therapy. Such data could be seen as far from reality, if compared to a...

Introduction In this first of many blog posts on the dark history of psychosomatic medicine, we take a look at multiple sclerosis (MS). Although we found little evidence that the disease itself was once viewed as psychosomatic (except for some marginal papers), there are strong indications that...

Frustrating article. I don't quite understand what they are trying to accuse ME activists of: It always seems to come down to: "activists want ME to be viewed as a biomedical disorder." But as Arnstein Mykletun himself says in the article (translated with google): "This distinction does not...

They looked at the number of members and post of online forums for different patient groups in Norway in 2009, then corrected those figures for the prevalence of each condition. Both the number of users and posts was much (more than 20 times) higher for ME/CFS than for other patient groups. This...

Saw this study because it was tweeted by Kristian Gundersen:

Abstract Objectives To examine the level of activity in online discussion forums for chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalopathy (CFS/ME) compared to other disorders. We hypothesized the level of activity to be higher in CFS/ME online discussion forums. Design Observational study Setting...

I think one could do the same with p-values: normally those just below 0.05 shouldn't be that common as seen in most papers, even if there was an effect. I doubt, however, that one can differentiate between data manipulation and reporting bias (or things like optional stopping).

Made me think of the following: almost all GET/CBT-trials report positive findings which is a bit weird. Such trials usually only have a power lower than 80% to detect a moderate effect size, so even if GET/CBT trials were effective and produced such a moderate effect, we wouldn't expect to find...

Thanks, I was able to read a copy thanks to the help of @lycaena. It's mostly about problems with the cognitive behavioural model of ME/CFS. If I understand correctly Kennedy was also one of the people who criticized the PACE trial at the very beginning. Thanks, it was already on my reading...

Thanks for the reading tip! The whole 'positive thinking is healthy' - movement also seems worth digging in to, but will probably take us a while.

I was hoping that there would be some good books on the topic that I could read and then summarize, but to my surprise, there was very little that provided a good overview. So that's when we decided to delve into the literature ourselves. We can already say that you'll always find something...

But NICE will likely not recommend ACT, so I suppose they will have to change the wording on their website. Perhaps it will look something like this: We believe that not all clinical care should have an evidence base. We therefore only offer treatment that has not been recommended by the...

In a new blog series, we will investigate how illnesses were once thought to result from stress, psychological disturbance, or deviant personality features. From the cancer-prone personality to the theory of ‘refrigerator mothers’, medicine appears to suffer from a recurrent tendency to...

Interestingly their website states: "We believe that all clinical care should have an evidence base. We therefore only offer treatment that has been recommended by the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE). NICE is reviewing its guidance which is now in draft form and users of...

I do not find it surprising that the number of cases increased over time. Underrepresentation of older people and increase of awareness of ME/CFS seem like plausible explanations for this. The decline since 2012 is probably because of a delay in diagnosis and maybe it takes a while to come into...

Twitter summary: 2) One has to take the results with a grain of salt because respondents to such surveys are not necessarily a representative reflection of ME/CFS patients as a whole. Nonetheless, almost 6000 respondents is huge: this might be approximately 1/3 of all ME patient in Norway 3)...

The Norwegian ME Association just published an impressive survey on 5.822 ME patients in Norway. An English summary is available here: https://me-foreningen.no/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Norwegian-ME-Association-2021-Report-on-the-course-of-illness-English-summary.pdf

Abstract Reports of long-lasting coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) symptoms, the so-called ‘long COVID’, are rising but little is known about prevalence, risk factors or whether it is possible to predict a protracted course early in the disease. We analyzed data from 4,182 incident cases of...

Thanks for sharing your experience @Nixxy