Opinion Chronic fatigue syndromes: real illnesses that people can recover from, 2023, The Oslo Chronic Fatigue Consortium

Not sure how relevant this is, it's just something I came across randomly while looking for something else. One of the authors is Mats Lekander (member of the Oslo Consortium). The sickness response hypothesis is big among Swedish BPS proponents including Jonsjö, Andreasson and Olsson.

Lipopolysaccharide-induced changes in the kynurenine pathway and symptoms of sickness behavior in humans
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306453023000884

 

According to an announcement by the Swedish Research Council yesterday, Oslo Consortium member Elin Lindsäter is being awarded two grants, 5 million SEK in total (approx 370 000 GBP, 423 000 EUR or 445 000 USD), for her research project Fatigue as a transdiagnostic symptom dimension: Identification and treatment in primary care (Original project title: Utmattning som transdiagnostisk symtomdimension: Identifikation och behandling i primärvård).

Research competence within primary care
https://www.vr.se/english/applying-...-research-competence-within-primary-care.html

Forskningskompetens inom primärvården 2023
https://www.vr.se/soka-finansiering...rskningskompetens-inom-primarvarden-2023.html

 

CL may refer to consultation-liaison psychiatry?

 

Thank you for the translation.

 

Or on a simpler translation;

We have a huge vested interest in this, can we get in on it?

 

Do we know why Norway is choosing to create guidelines for fatigue in general rather than for specific conditions? It rather feels that this is already well down the BPS psychogenic rabbit hole, where instead of developing condition specific solutions there is ever greater lumping together of diverse and unrelated conditions to justify irrelevant generic responses.

It is on a par with suggesting a general limping therapy for all conditions with leg and hip involvement, regardless of aetiology.

 

I suspect it saves money.

 

What a weird letter. Mostly overlooks their past, uh, "work", makes much about cancer fatigue, for some reason, and a mockery of talking about representing some groups of patients, which they do not. As if writing a widely condemned letter filled with nonsense is notable work.

Obviously these people should never come anywhere near anything related to fatigue, or frankly about anything related to health, even remotely, but I suspect they will be welcome. We haven't had decades of abject failure without the failure being well-represented.

 

Mark Vink's response to this was rejected by the journal and so has been posted as a pre-print.

Decade old approach, relabelled as a new one by the Oslo Chronic Fatigue Consortium, is harmful and does not lead to objective improvement in ME/CFS or long Covid

Abstract
The article by the Oslo Chronic Fatigue Consortium led by Alme, does not provide any scientific evidence for their "alternative narrative" which in reality has been dominating the field of ME/CFS and post infectious diseases for the last 35 years. Additionally, they ignore the overwhelming amount of evidence that ME/CFS and long Covid are physical diseases. Moreover, their own studies show that gradually increasing exercise/activities does not lead to objective improvements and has a negative instead of a positive effect on work and illness benefit status. Additionally, NICE concluded in October 2021 that gradually increasing
exercise/activity is harmful and should not be used. If the medical profession had taken post infectious diseases seriously as we should have, instead of psychologising them for decades, then by now we would have had many different effective pharmacological treatments for long Covid and ME/CFS and the world would not be clutching at straws on how to treat the estimated 65 million patients with long Covid.

https://osf.io/preprints/osf/xe82n

 

An excellent article.

I was struck by the irony of this article being rejected in the context of the following statement in the Abstract to the Oslo Consortium article: “Finally, we call for a much more open and constructive dialogue about these conditions. This dialogue should include a wider range of views, including those of patients who have recovered from them.”

Does this then mean ‘a wider range of views as long as they agree with us’?

 

Opinion piece by Lekander and others, published today in the journal of the Swedish Medical Association:

Cartesiansk dualism i ohälsans otjänst – nytt steg efterlyses
Vi behöver bli bättre på att kommunicera kring kropp och »själ«
https://lakartidningen.se/klinik-oc...lism-i-ohalsans-otjanst-nytt-steg-efterlyses/

Google translate, English

 

Oh, by free speech they mean that they speak and you're free to listen. Easy confusion. They've always worked to censor and silence us, and have been very effective at it.

Then several of them will keep on harping about free speech and censorship, as they have for years while they do everything in their power to make us disappear, to make sure no one hears us and that our very lives are not even recorded accurately.

For this journal it's a really bad look, but they expect zero consequences for it and they're right about it. That's the privilege of holding power. They don't have to be honorable about it when the intent is just to win. With power comes the need for grace, to be above pettiness and to withhold from abusing that position. But without that abuse, none of this stands up. Abuse and lies are all they've ever had.

 

A "new" step. That is the old step. Their step, and only that. Always. They can't even define or name what that step is, because it's always the same step, back well over a century. Talking against dualism and about body and soul. Or body and mind, if it's just lost in translation.

And they speak of a conflict between biological and psychospiritual, but in reality it was always a conflict between an accurate description, and an inaccurate one. It's not even about models, the split begins at its very description, and several ways at that. But to bring out the old debunked tropes about harassment, even the fake concerns over their meeting and need to have "guards" out of concern is ridiculous.

This nonsense has been going on for decades and all they have is bullying and acting without honor, even speaking without honor, misrepresenting both what they do and the criticism it receives.

Ironically, the mention of how it's defined culturally differently in different countries actually highlights how they are the problem, since it's not patients who describe those problems this way but the professionals, with their biases and preferences. Even though the problems are largely similar as reported by patients, they have very different definitions because those definitions come from the preferred alternative causes that professionals assign on them. We define the illness according to how it's experienced and reported, they define it according to alternative models that ignore most of it.

This is like how many religious ideologies have invented myths about the same phenomena of nature. Even though nature is the same everywhere. The difference is not between nature here, and nature there. It's in the myths.

And really you have to marvel at the Orwellian peak of this:

You won't find purer irony than this anywhere. It has no traces of impurity.