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A few years ago an editor pointed out to me that in my discussion of some quantum mechanical metaphysics I had written back-peddling when I meant back-pedalling. Seems to me you meant special-peddling, not special pleading!!

Thanks, my flagging system seems a bit arbitrary. I wouldn't think it was a bad option. Signals can be blocked either in nerve tissue or elsewhere. We are getting to the stage when almost any malfunction can potentially be corrected with genes or monoclonals or whatever.

Nice to be able to draw a conclusion without any results.

I hope they have done the trial properly.

This is worrying. I hope it is not an indication that ill-informed MPs are now in charge of detailed healthcare decisions. Very simply my wife would be dead without ECT. And so would tens of thousands of others. Maybe the fact that more women get ECT means they are lucky - getting better...

I suspect not in that the signalling they describe is well known. They have identified some specific airway nerves but that does not seem very relevant to ME. I think that the study may serve to remind us that symptoms of feeling ill involve both peripheral and central signal components. With...

To be fair the (null) hypothesis that symptoms of ME are generated in the brain irrespective of peripheral tissues is falsifiable in principle. Science does not require that you have a slam dunk way to falsify ready and waiting - just that in principle you might have some fairly good options one...

Enough local anaesthetic to prevent pain at all sites would probably induce fatal ventricular dysrhythmia. Also abolition of pain by blocking peripheral nerves would not exclude the possibility that the pain was due to the brain misinterpreting normal inputs from the nerves.

If there is a mechanism. I am increasingly sceptical that the tragus branch of the vagus nerve is anything other than some skin sensory fibres that at some point in embryogenesis got packaged with the stomach nerve. The facial nerve includes fibres that move the face - smiling etc. and taste...

Yes, my guess from experience in clinic is that 'sugar' was used in the UK by people born before around 1910 and perhaps a decade or so later. Insulin became available in the late 1920s. Diabetes charities were set up in the 1930s. Diabetes mellitus became vastly more prevalent than insipidus...

I wonder if in fact the use of 'he's got sugar' was a shortening of 'he's got sugar diabetes', or strictly speaking diabetes mellitus rather than diabetes insipidus.

But presumably having been thought up by some random person on the spur of the moment and sounded good to enough people to finally get ratified. We have no guarantee that the ratification was actually what determined the usage. A few virologists in a pub had probably already reckoned it would...

I am pretty sure it is the same haphazard process that gave us 'biro' in the UK, 'bic' in USA, 'hoover' (all with small letters), croque monsieur, SARS, Long Covid, socialism, dental floss, orthopaedics, mansplaining, osteoarthritis and so many other words. I like ME/CFS because it says ' this...

It may be as well to shift away from eponymous disease names but I don't see much logic in dropping apostrophes. Part of the argument seems to be that in other languages it may not make sense. However, the apostrophe has the great advantage of indicating that the word before is someone's name -...

Worth remembering that rabbit have very big ears and don't often stand up.

Microglia are part of the innate immune system. 'Immune suppression' is usually used to mean suppression of the adaptive immune response, although it is a fairly useless term anyway. Cells like microglia are very effectively suppressed by corticosteroids, which do little for ME. Even if glia...

There are electronic alarm clocks for sale by e.g. Sony that an iPod can be fixed to and presumably produce any recording including birdsong. They look to be about £50 new but eBay has things for under £10. I have never used an iPod myself so don't know the details. You really need a...

No.

Girls are supposed to be the target of this, not boys. And if this is not poisoning what if it is an intelligent strategy on the part of these girls to draw world attention to their plight? It has always seemed to me that many psychiatrists treat other human beings as playthings. A few are...

The recommendations you list have no basis in evidence, as you say. Being a prestigious hospital is unfortunately no guarantee physicians will provide useful advice. The policy here is to avoid giving advice on medical treatment so I think that is all I can say.