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Hard to predict but: The forced separation of children with ME from their family, because they decline (further) GET treatment would most likely disappear. The admission that CBT/GET as line of research has ended would mark the end of an era and probably stimulate and vitalize other research...

Something like a condensed, practice-oriented IOM report would be very useful. PS: there is a primer for pediatric ME/CFS which I like Note the bolded parts. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fped.2017.00121/full

If the wrong questions have been asked, what would be the right questions? One good question is: How can doctors best support patients with ME/CFS even when there's no proven treatment yet?

Thanks Andy. I think it could be useful to leave comments to show that this is an important topic. Maybe it will help attract some attention from readers that otherwise have no contact with the topics ME/CFS or LP.

Thanks for sharing. It is interesting. I used to meditate and thought it would be a way to control the illness but eventually gave up because it made things worse. I know from this practice that one can learn to reach blissful and other pleasant and powerful emotional states through meditation...

Another aspect is this: There are patients that are too sick to care for themselves and dependent on family which also abuses them verbally because they are frustrated and find it difficult to believe in an illness without an objective test and a doctor's reassurance that this is real. Sending...

I don't think researchers should be allowed to say whatever they want about patients while being protected by academic freedom. It is incredibly toxic and damaging to send the message out that patients create their own illness. It is inexcusable to do this when there's no evidence this is...

I see it differently. The assumptions are important because they determine the treatment approach taken. If researchers continue to try and make a treatment approach work which doesn't really work, then it's important to criticize the assumptions that they are making. Maybe this would be easier...

They are trying to explain why some people have persistent physical symptoms that can't be explained by medicine. There's more but text can't be copied properly so I'm not going to copy all the important parts here. Anyway I find this idea very questionable. There is a limit to how much you...

@Jonathan Edwards in your excellent letter you say I think this is not an accurate comment. It is sensible and sufficient to focus on the methodological problems but it's not honest to say that the research isn't being criticized because it's "psychological". It is being criticized because...

Hi, did you do the lightning process? Can you describe it?

Is it not-worth-reading babble?

I think of the BPS narrative as a form of brutality inflicted on patients. It doesn't involve any obvious violence but it has been extremely effective in depriving patients of adequate support, recognition, research and treatments. No other illness is treated like this. No other illness is so...

Can you link to the article?

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...