Search results

Versus Arthritis are interested in a wide range of things. They certainly fund widespread pain studies, muscle disease and so on. It may be that their remit is more or less that of rheumatology, which has quite wide borders. The MRC obviously has a very wide remit but in terms of charities I am...

Primary outcome is Chalder fatigue scale. If this is genuinely blinded it may not matter if the outcome measure is suboptimal.

I think it is a pretty big achievement to get 9,000 samples in. I always thought that it would be reasonably straightforward to get the first half of the number wanted and that getting the second half would need some pushing. Is now the time to try other avenues for publicity. I am wondering...

I find this very hard to interpret but I suspect that the findings in figure 2 of high levels in ME and low in FM and middling in normals is just an artefact of them looking for the biggest differences between ME and FM - which are more or less bound to show that pattern or near enough. To me...

This is presumably because a number of very very rich people who have to work until ten o clock at night moving money around for very very very rich people are peed off because some very poor people are getting a little bit of cash to pay their bills while they go to food banks. How come that...

Let's face it, this (hermeneutics) is just hard core drivel yet again. Unless you have a fairy frock and beads and can dance around in those two overlapping circles in bare feet and chant creativity you haven't a chance. The more people witter on about applying common sense the more likely...

This doesn't seem to make any sense to me. All they seem to be saying is that if Covid-19 causes ME then they haven't been able to find any clues as to what factors are critical in causation. Not that there is no causation.

I think it was done in mice. They like their vaccinations before breakfast so they can do a bit of scratching. I personally like a vaccination either at 11.30 am so that I can get home for lunch before it starts to itch - or just before tea time. I can't see health services going in for the...

All I can see in the abstract and conclusions are vague suppositions about regulation of some unspecified immune response. A decent paper gives you some data, without too much interpretation. If there are interesting results here, why not tell us?

As far as I can see there are two Richar Smiths, both involve in political pressure groups on health. I had thought it was the other one but it looks as if it is the one who was a doctor and once editor of BMJ. He has a reputation for callous commentary - in relation to cancer in particular.

The abstract is soberingly impressive. I hope Joshua goes on to find the needle in the haystack. In the meantime, this is useful work precisely because the findings were negative.

This all looks like complete nonsense. In line with previous papers from these authors. Is it of any interest to an ME forum? I cannot quite see why.

Now, if we are sure that myalgia is really down to Long Covid, then we can signpost them to information and self-management services. I do believe that most areas now, certainly in England, have community Long Covid clinics. And so, it's really helpful to refer these patients to these settings...

I was talking about fringe theories rather than 'fringe cases'. What I mean by a fringe theory is something that most people who look carefully would judge to be vague or incoherent speculation. Highlighting rare diseases makes sense. Highlighting academic babble doesn't.

I am doubtful that there is justification for including Empty Sella Syndrome specifically. Low pituitary function of any cause might produce symptoms misdiagnosed as ME. (I doubt ESS would produce symptoms for other reasons.) The paper quoted suggesting that changes in CSF pressure may be...

As far as I can see Richard Smith is not a doctor but a health economist. The chanting of the BPS mantras seems to be second hand. Embodied cognition isn't even a theory. It is a sort of pseudoscientific incantation. When one sees this garbage trotted out in this blasé way by some one doesn't...

I keep wondering who this Topol guy is. (Presumably not who played Fiddler on the Roof.) Is he just an AI bot that tweets anything trite? What is his viewpoint on this - he doesn't seem to have one except wanting to tweet all the time? Have I missed something?

I think your concerns are very realistic. Natural mutation is a bit like randomly changing a letter in a Shakespeare sonnet. 99.999% of the time what you get is a sonnet that isn't quite right and gets replaced by a correct version. Deliberate human mutation is more like deliberately changing a...

The Wikipedia article gives what looks like a reasonable history. Ever since viral genomes have been sequenced and can be altered presumably people have been tinkering with them - maybe for fifteen years. The implications are that at any time a deliberate mutation may prove to generate a virus...

That result looks very odd. There seems to be about a threefold increase in risk for a whole range of unrelated disorders. Ankylosing spondylitis is not an autoimmune disease and is largely genetically determined, for instance. I strongly suspect that they picking up on some systematic bias...