Different patterns of persistent somatic symptoms after COVID-19 reported by the Dutch media and the general population, 2024, Ballering et al.

Prof. Rosmalen probably never heard that many people don't read newspapers anymore.
Bad articles in newspapers? Or even worse research?
They got funds for this garbage.
O'Sullivan and Rosmalen explaining away LC, must be a trend in BPS.

 

Is the article saying that you can't explain it away after all?
If it was explainable by mass hysteria spread by articles it would be like the articles and it wasn't?

 

That’s my interpretation of the abstract. Wyller is going to hate this.

 

Age, mean (SD)
Positive: 52.4 (11.7)
Control: 54.0 (12.4)

From the appendix of their other study:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)01214-4/fulltext#app-1

 

Interesting that Rosmalen's name is on this. The fact that Long-Covid is a patient defined term should have made the article and analysis obsolete though. People were gathering with an array of symptoms on social media, precisely because nobody was reporting on any of this in the news media.

When Garner called out Monbiot for causing Long-Covid by writing his article, a substantial percentage of people had long since developed Long-Covid. It seems that afterwards the rates stabilised. Should one ask Garner whether Monbiots powers reduced the growth rate of Long-Covid?

 

For what it's worth, I don't think this study debunks the hypothesis. It's just not a good study, but also I don't think this can be studied competently. It's far too diffuse a concept, entirely impossible to study in isolation.

However, the idea remains silly nonsense, regardless of whether a few researchers want it to be true or not (which here they clearly do, so much for equipoise), and whether they can successfully fish for confirming 'evidence' or not. There is simply nothing credible behind the concept of mass nocebo, or even the nocebo itself (as otherwise we would literally never hear anyone say "that hurt less than I feared it would") a weird idea invented centuries before the scientific revolution, which can be entirely dismissed along with angels and fairies.

And we all know that regardless of whether a large-scale and very rigorous study could provide substantial evidence against this belief, no one who holds it will change their mind. They will keep vaguely hinting at it, or variously reframing the same idea, attributed to the next turtle down the line.

Oh, for sure.

I remain forever amazed that so many physicians can whine about LC having been defined by patients first as a reason to poopoo the whole thing, when it actually represents a massive failure on part of the medical profession. No, airplane pilots are not expected to ask the opinions of passengers about how to fly a plane. But if both pilots end up dead, and no one is flying the plane, you should definitely expect passengers to do their best to land it. Except here it's more like the pilots were playing poker, drunk in the galley, and not remotely interested in where the plane was going, literally laughing at passengers telling them about all the alarms going off and the tower control asking them where the hell they are.

 

The tower control doesn’t communicate with the plane because there are no crashes if they don’t know about them. At least in Norway..

 

I think this article is somewhat useful to show how media representation of the illness is not representative of the average experience of the illness, symptomatically.