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All in all, I found the percentages of patients who met each of the case definitions to be quite high. I suspected the problem would be much bigger!

Some more quotes: "I was also getting really tachycardic on any exertion. And I didn’t want to admit it because I think I was worried about it being dismissed as anxiety" - Jenna "I wondered if I could have some basic bloods. She said “there’s nothing we can do, this is all post-viral and you...

Thanks! We're starting with illnesses where psychosomatic theories were once quite popular or influential, but where the dominant view has strongly shifted over the years. For example asthma, epilepsy, colitis, autism etc. Migraine however seems to be an example, unfortunately, where...

New blog post on the dark psychosomatic history of asthma: In this blog post, we delve into the psychosomatic history of asthma. Long considered an archetypal psychosomatic condition, asthma was said to reflect a suppressed cry for the mother’s help or attention. Patients with asthma were...

I simply use my laptop on my lap while sitting or lying down. I doubt that you need any special kind of chair or setup, just a small (14 inch or smaller) laptop with a good enough trackpad so you don't need a mouse.

Made me wonder if someone is writing a diary of what life with ME/CFS is like in the early 21st century. Could be an interesting project.

More good news from Germany:

Studies like this one do not answer many questions. Still waiting for the first decent epidemiological study that shows that COVID-19 leads to increased disability and/or ME/CFS compared to a control group.

This is really great news.

Sounds like great news.

This study has been used as an example of the nocebo-effect: patients who were told that the medicine could result in erectile dysfunction reported this side-effect 3 times as much as the control group who were given no such warning. I think it might also show how easy it is for trialists to...

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...