BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

These individuals may want to consider a more holistic approach to health: a healthy diet, exercise, stress relief, cognitive behavior therapy, social support, remediation of underlying nutritional deficiencies or underlying hormonal imbalances
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The Answer to all unsolved health problems. :rolleyes:

5vforest said:
(I am in fact very sympathetic towards wanting to discuss the potential harms of perpetual lockdowns, so it pains me that they are constantly minimizing the risk of long COVID.)
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Yes. Nobody is arguing that lock downs are problem free. But they are a critical part of the pathway to becoming COVID free, and hence lock down free.

The more people resist lock down, and doing it properly, the more lock downs we are going to need, and the greater and more persistent the adverse effects of lock downs.

Just imagine if the world had gone into coordinated and strict lock down for just 6 weeks at the start of this.
 
This article is from last week, but just saw Medscape sharing it on twitter. Am a bit surprised to see this in Medscape, and with no mention of PEM in some long Covid patients. Bolding is mine.

Medscape 'It's Deconditioning, Stupid': Exercise Limitations After COVID-19 Infection Commentary by Aaron B. Holley, MD

Quotes:
What is deconditioning? In lay terms, it's synonymous with being out of shape. In medical terms, it's the process by which human beings lose muscle mass and aerobic capacity following inactivity. The rate at which deconditioning occurs is dependent on a number of factors. Speaking from personal and professional experience, I promise you that it occurs quickly. One hallmark of deconditioning is poor self-awareness and the tendency to attribute symptoms to organ dysfunction rather than lack of fitness.

...

In summary, if your patient was hospitalized for COVID-19, they're deconditioned. The degree and duration of deconditioning will vary by age, length of stay, iatrogenia (like steroids or paralysis), and fitness level prior to admission. Younger, healthier post–COVID-19 outpatients have not been well studied. Deconditioning is not the sole contributor to post–COVID-19 symptoms, but until we learn more about the complex interaction between recovery times and disease effects, it provides a target for treatment. "It's deconditioning, stupid."
 
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Bless em

Once they come up with an idea, no matter how absurd, no matter that all the evidence contradicts it, they stick with it

That's dogged determination that is.

The same thing may well be responsible for all the fictional people driving into rivers, as satnav is always right, even when waters coming in through the door seals.
 
One hallmark of deconditioning is poor self-awareness and the tendency to attribute symptoms to organ dysfunction rather than lack of fitness.
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I know lots of people who are deconditioned in the sense that they do not exercise much and know it and they are all aware they should exercise more and do not attribute it to organ dysfunction.

Similarly, the sort of people I know who are active without being athletic don't have much trouble with deconditioning after a fortnight in bed with the flu. After being laid up for a fortnight with the flu, my dad had another two weeks before he could return to work but then he was back to a physical job.

I wonder if the likes of soldiers and athletes are so fit that they are very aware of when it drops. Makes me think of school where people who were fairly good did not bother if their marks went from 76 to 72 but the ones who usually got 99 were pulled up if they got 95.

And maybe soldiers insist they have organ dysfunction if their superiors demand to know why they haven't managed the obstacle course :)
 
BPS recipe for normalising a genuine physical problem:

Take whatever might be a reasonable complaint of the physically ill, and assert that this “is typical” of whatever your favoured explanation might be! (No justification or evidence required.)
 
Simon Wessely and Esther Crawley spoke at this Spotlight on Long Covid webinar at the Royal Society of Medicine, but it was members only, and apparently the recording was only available for a month, so we may never benefit from the valuable contributions they no doubt made.

https://www.rsm.ac.uk/events/rsm-studios/2020-21/cep68/

Any ideas how it to get hold of it?

Edit: spelling and to add link to their biographies
https://www.rsm.ac.uk/media/5475090/rsm-spotlight-on-long-covid-speaker-biographies.pdf
 
Sean said:
That is one of the weirdest statements I have seen in a field stuffed full of such statements. o_O
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It's similar to the idea I believe I've seen that people with somatic symptom disorder are more likely to focus on physical symptoms and deny a psychological cause, and those things are actually seen as a hallmark of it.

It's not good scientific thinking at all
 
petrichor said:
It's similar to the idea I believe I've seen that people with somatic symptom disorder are more likely to focus on physical symptoms and deny a psychological cause, and those things are actually seen as a hallmark of it.

It's not good scientific thinking at all
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I see this thinking everywhere...in this strange world where logic is turned on its head and effects become causes.

cassava7 said:
...presentation by Dr Newton and Victoria Strassheim is off of the back of their 2018 paper, funded by PoTS UK.....

7.2 Avoidance of movement

Fear of movement and avoidance behaviour towards physical activity has been reported in CFS/ME and other fatigue associated conditions (Nijs et al., 2012; Vergauwen et al., 2015). Activity avoidance has been related to various clinical characteristics of CFS/ME, including symptom severity, reduced quality of life and disability (Vergauwen et al., 2015; Scerbo et al., 2017; Nijs and Malfliet, 2016).​
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Activity avoidance is related to disability and reduced QOL...duh?! Not being able to do stuff is obviously going to reduce QOL.
 
Another opinion piece on long covid as a cultural illness by Swedish journalist Hanne Kjöller :grumpy:

Postcovid: samma symtom i ny förpackning
https://kvartal.se/artiklar/langtidscovid/

Google Translate, English ("Postcovid: same symptoms in new packaging")
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the concept of cultural illness, as defined by Johannisson, does not consider "whether or not a condition can be detected by biomedical markers, but focuses [on] mechanisms of dissemination and internalisation: i.e. why and how a particular image of illness is transmitted, legitimised and portrayed in a particular present". Thus, there is no contradiction between skin rashes/ulcers (as exhibited by the electromagnetic hypersensitivity sufferers), pulmonary hypertension or other measurable or visible symptoms and cultural illness.

Anyone who has read Karin Johannisson or studied the ingredients and cyclical course of cultural illnees sswill probably recognise much of the discussion of postcovid. The aggressive debate, the media dramatisation, the "contagion effect" and the split "between sceptical scientists and doctors, between doctors and patients or patient groups, between doctors and others who believe in or have something to gain from the new diagnoses", as Johannisson put it in 2008.
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In numerous reports, not least representatives of the multidisciplinary postcovid clinic in Solna, Sweden, talk about a morbidity that often affects previously healthy, fit women.20 Karin Johannisson has shown how a cultural illness needs to be linked to "prestigious sectors of the working world" in order to be successful. And that prestigious diagnoses lose status as they spread to wider groups and at the same time become more of a women's condition.21 Such is the life cycle of the cultural illness from birth to death by soot.

Among the cultural bearers of a particular diagnosis, then, there is an interest in portraying the sick as previously perfectly healthy, strong and socio-economically "successful". But is that the case?
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The symptoms are very real and in some cases measurable. Therefore, all talk of body or soul is deadly dull. Instead, we should look at body and soul. But the fact that the body is signalling danger does not necessarily mean that this is where the problem has arisen. Or that it is the body that should be treated.

Avoidance and symptom fixation are, we now know, a poor solution. You develop a sensitivity - sensitisation - to the symptoms. The nervous system learns that the symptoms are dangerous and will raise the alarm. The alarm sounds for the alarm, says Åsa Kadowaki.31

Focusing on function, rather than symptoms, is what has been clinically and research proven to help many patients regain their lives.32 This is why patient associations, with their one-sided demands for biomedical investigations, explanatory models and research, can be the worst enemy of the sick.

Åsa Kadowaki uses the term covid-anxiety and states: if you spend more than an hour a day googling, facebooking, participating, symptom-rating, being angry at the health care system, making phonecalls- then you meet the criteria for obsessive-compulsive disorder.33
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Trish said:
What a horrible article. I don't understand why so many people think it's acceptable for them to perpetuate myths like catastrophising, fear avoidance and secondary gain to put down sick people.
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It's prejudice and bigotry.

They layer a thin veneer of pseudoscience over the top to make it appear more respectable, but when you get down to it, it's still prejudice.
 
Arguing that LC "looks a lot" like "cultural illness" is like marvelling at the fact that the celestial spheres really looked a lot like when you observe the solar system and wow what a coincidence! Which is of course precisely why and how the celestial spheres were invented: to match the observations, not to explain them.

Cultural illness was literally invented as a narrative to match the observations of epidemic outbreaks leading to chronic health problems. Of course it looks a lot like it was built custom-made to it. It's hard to believe that such absurd nonsense is actually published outside of fringe pseudoscientific communities.
 
Ah well, the tweet got deleted. From a mental health nurse, showing a slide of a recent Trudie Chalder talk about mental health in LC. Tagged #mentalhealth and #cbt of course.

So Chalder is still going around "teaching" people about her pseudoscience.

Since it's still in my bookmarks:
Ann Cunningham - @theparcproject #mentalhealth on Twitter: "Attended an Excellent Workshop by Trudie Chalder Today that will be Incorporated in Psychosocial Interventions @theparcproject Outcome: The Impact of Covid Infection and Fatigue Experienced Thereafter Should Not Be Understated #longcovid #cbt #compassion #pleasurableactivity https://t.co/F8cnkWLmv0" / Twitter
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Can't find what it is, @theparcproject here should have been a hashtag but there's not much on it: https://twitter.com/search?q=#theparcproject&src=typed_query&f=top.

 
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