Developing services for long COVID: lessons from a study of wounded healers, Ladds, Greenhalgh et al, 2021

Open access, https://www.rcpjournals.org/content/clinmedicine/21/1/59

 

The conclusion that will be drawn by the MUSers from this is that even a medical training doesn't protect against false illness beliefs.

 

They have previously complained about medical professionals who collude with or reinforce false MUS beliefs by doing biomedical testing or making consultant referrals, so this is more of the same reasoning.

 

Almost like this is a systemic failure. Almost. But that's too much like what the chronic illness has been saying since... forever. And as we know from experience, to medicine the chronically ill are always wrong except when we comply with absurd demands.

Who's going to win: a cruel system, the very ideal of the banality of evil, that will want to further escalate commitment into BPS fantasyland, the very cause of failure? Or hundreds of thousands of newly chronically ill, including many doctors who would have been in the first camp had they not won the unfortunate lottery?

Of course those odds could tip significantly if the hundreds of thousands were acknowledged to actually be millions. Maybe. But can reality pierce through the ideological bubble? So far it never has.

The other side of the desk reaaaally sucks.

 

Has Trisha Greenhalgh failed to notice that she has put her name to a paper that supports much of what PwME have experienced? The medics who participated expressed how helpful social media groups have been to them; PwME have been told in the past to avoid such contacts.

Participants spoke of the “frustrations and callousness experienced in encounters with the healthcare system”. Where does she think these attitudes towards patients came from? She is friends with the people who made post viral illness into a psychosomatic illness to be disparaged and ignored.

She calls for “ an honest acknowledgement of the uncertainties, acceptance of the evidence gap and openness to draw on other resources (e.g. colleagues or patient experience)”; PwME are however not given this acknowledgement.

She is taking the participants in the study seriously at the moment. The Royal Free Hospital medical staff were taken seriously at the time. I’m beginning to wonder if medical advocates who suffer post viral illness will eventually be undermined, too.

 

It's something, isn't it? What is described here as a horrible experience, as something clearly wrong, misguided and causing serious harm, is literally standard treatment for chronic illness, which Greenhalgh proudly supports in full and no doubt many of those physicians applied many times in their medical practice. It follows standard practice as advised by many health care systems and medical publishers.

What is described is essentially the BPS model. It's clearly wrong and they recognize it, but they can't accept the obvious conclusion: that the model is wrong. Instead what is said is that it's wrong to apply it to them. It's fine to treat other people with chronic illness like street garbage, as long as they are exempted from it.

Like a pure concentrate of everything wrong in medicine. It recognizes the problem but reaches the obviously wrong conclusion, one that happens to be entirely self-serving.

And after ignoring no less than hundreds of thousands of complaints of this dreadful dystopian nightmare, millions the world over, after dismissing legitimate reports of harm and attacking the victims, Greenhalgh thinks it's time for a RCT after a single unhinged pseudoscientific anecdote. Out of one anecdote, which clearly shows she didn't listen to a damn thing long haulers said as she continues to ignore PEM and put everything to "the fatigue". Even though there already is such a trial, not an RCT but that's what she means anyway. There are only a handful of projects funded and REGAIN is the biggest one.

Unless she means LP, of course. Would be nice to know.

 

Erratum: Developing services for long COVID: lessons from a study of wounded healers

This article was originally published as a paper in the special section on functional disorders in the January 2021 issue of Clinical Medicine. It should have been published as a standalone original research paper, and this has been corrected in the online edition of the journal. The editor-in-chief and editorial office apologise for this error.

https://www.rcpjournals.org/content/clinmedicine/21/2/160

 

Uh uh. I guess we should not conclude anything from that the same way we should not conclude anything from Cochrane arbitrarily classifying us in common mental health disorders. OK.