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Anyone who guessed that Robert C Smith MD is a very old white man is correct: https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/experts/robert-c-smith-md http://www.im.msu.edu/for applicants section/key faculty profiles/key faculty cvs/smith_cv.PDF (BS 1959, MD 1962) "Establishing the Scientific Validation...

This guy paid almost 8000 pounds for tests and a specialists to tell him that there is no damage to his heart, brain or legs, that his symptoms are partly due to deconditioning and to state with confidence that he will make a full recovery. I don't have the heart to tell him otherwise.

Assuming 0% false positives and 10% false negatives, this still means that the proportion of the population who has been infected must be between 4%-16.7%. Each % of false positives on the test subtracts from the upper bound. Similarly, since people who are infected are more likely to be tested...

It is not common of all viral illnesses, and tends to be specific to 'neurotropic' viruses that infect the olfactory bulb. (of course herpesviruses and enteroviruses are on that list.) Of course if you want to go down the speculative path of betacoronaviruses...

Seems the apologists are out in full force...

Notably, "medical condition" forwards onto the "disease" Wikipedia page.

No. Simply that old men have greater case fatality rates (which in turn is due to greater underlying health risk factors). Women are just as susceptible to COVID-19 as men, but in some countries, young women are more likely to be exposed to the virus and hence have higher cases among women...

Exactly! "It's not a Post-Viral-Syndrome, it's unusual symptoms caused by the virus" is the same experience most ME and CFS patients went through. I understand why patients and some doctors are reluctant to apply the PVS/PVFS/CFS labels - they know that those labels are toxic. Yet they don't...

I'd suggest almost all of the PVS recoveries are spontaneous in nature, based on luck/natural recovery.

Yes, I'm not going to get excited about this one.

The antibody levels aren't disappearing, they're merely dropping because the immune system has no ongoing need of high antibody levels once the infection has been dealt with. The people who are "worried" have not bothered to read or cite what happens after other infections or vaccinations. It is...

There seems to be a lot of confusion within the medical community as to what "functional" really means (some do not believe it means psychological). Yet the baggage that the term brings suggests that it is inherently problematic.

I see what you did there! Also note, from: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02589886 I therefore suspect the "self-help" website in the intervention is at least partially based on Jon Stone's neurosymptoms dot org (no direct link please).

Warning: you may feel sad after reading the acknowledgments...

I meant to say the observed pattern, it seems my attention to detail is poor today.

Notably, the assumption is the opposite direction of Phair's metabolic trap hypothesis.

I am really surprised as to why journalists and scientists aren't bothering to look whether the same thing happens after other infections and vaccinations. The observed pattern in antibody titres is typical post-infection and not yet a cause for concern.

Depression was found in 15.6% of CFS patients, which does not seem like an unreasonable estimate. Cancer prevalence was 6.4% in CFS patients, which seems high, given a rate of 1.9% in age matched controls. In principle, there shouldn't be a presentation bias for cancer in CFS patients, unless...

Cortisol is a feed-forward metabolic hormone, it's purpose is to provide sufficient blood glucose upon wakening and smooth the blood glucose level over the day given anticipated activity demands (insulin is a feed-back metabolic hormone...). Despite all the pop-psychology on the contrary, it's...

There is one major difference: New Zealand (and Australia until recently) had very little community transmission, which means there is a very different demographic distribution as to who was infected. We cannot and should not assume that testing is somehow a magnitude of order lower than it...