Effect of Pain Reprocessing Therapy vs Placebo and Usual Care for Patients With Chronic Back Pain an RCT, 2021, Asher, Gordon et al

Another LP acronym — the coincidence is unfortunate.

 

Agreed. At least using brainwashing makes people ask 'in what' and think that could be negative as well as anything else and puts the focus exactly where it should be: 'where's the evidence that is both useful and won't backfire?'.

And when we think about the 'false beliefs CFS-CBT' that seems little different in premise to the gay conversion courses' aim of teaching people you can choose or that something is based on beliefs rather than 'is'. I see no benefit when I see charities calling it psychology (which too many laypersons assume means it is 'good') - at best it is a behavioural paradigm using pseudo techniques to change these to something at odds with their body. Why is the CFS one not noting this and getting outrage people actually did this too? It's important for both and any others that are stuck under these dodgy ideas that they are clubbed together and 'outed' as being some of the things that have been believed in and done under the category-label of mental health/psych.

The harm of, even if it was hi-tech like they infer (rather than a bunch of people saying persuasions and manipulations to get a patient to think like a bigoted layperson about themselves), that idea is for some reason never investigated or seen as questionable and potentially damaging - I find it weird that is lost into 'taken as given' under the distraction blather that brainwashing is good by naming it as something else.

That they don't care about this is evidenced by the never follow-up long term and properly where it is out of the control of the investigator. Where is the yellow card reporting? This is free access to people's minds and lives and feels like old psych experiments in the 70s and before you hear about, so where is the register that requires follow-up on these things as they are far from non-serious. Particularly if you consider only the fact it deprives access to real investigation or treatment in the first place being a serious issue for those injuries that could be fixed biomedically. But also, ironically for their press claims, I imagining this is incredibly high risk for damaging mental health/causing psychological damage

- acknowledgement of which would mean at least there would have to be sections in these reports where these aspects (risk) were discussed and would lead to better thought-through and less off-the-shelf of nonsense treatments that didn't need to have safeguards built in.

 

Great if you can be taught to ignore chronic pain (mostly used on chronic back pain). The trick must be to convince yourself that you are the cause of the pain or the pain continuing.

If your nerves are churning out aberrant pain signals and won't stop doing it, though drugs mask that effect somewhat, then how is that under your control? This is insulting to people with moderate to severe chronic pain.

The adherents to this approach are using the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (I got better therefore it's because I had wanted to get better...and presto chang-o, magic voila).

Improvement is likely due to unknown reasons, one is based on the premise that the body does try to heal itself via various mechanisms.

My antenae are activated by this sort of practioner: to me it reeks of an easy (read: lazy) way to practice medicine or psychology and still make money.

 

Comparing CBT for ME with gay conversion therapies is exactly right. Let's face it they want to change our slothful, self pitying ways! But in the same way you can't change someone from being gay we can't cure our serious biological deficits. Both things are doomed to failure and that just adds to the moral outrage felt about us.

The instructions in the DWP handbook which said "People with ME think they can't walk but they could if they wanted to" are typical of the way ME was dismissed as a moral vacuum.

 

That's completely at odds with how I describe my condition to others. For example, I was once on the phone with someone at a physical therapy clinic, and I said "I have no physical limitations in the conventional sense..." then described PEM.

The way I've seen it described by others is that if you "can" do something but it makes you incapacitated for days afterward, you're not really able to do it.

 

They might have changed it now but that phrase was thanks to our BPS overlords. The way I would describe it is that we do not have broken structures but the power to make them work is not there. Nowadays, people can understand having a perfectly good phone with a broken battery.

I did not get many points when I went for PIP. I believe their get out clause now is that you only get points if you are not able to do something not if you feel better not doing it. So no points for feeling better if someoen cooks for you if you could do it with a struggle.

Of course, that contradicts the fact that you get the points if you can't do something without it making you ill, like being able to climb a flight of stairs but getting angina.

All comes down to not believing ME is a real disease, I suppose.

 

If you 1ook back to the origina1 government iterations of the PIP criteria, it's obvious they wanted to exc1ude what they considered 'fatigue conditions' from obtaining the benefit.

https://assets.publishing.service.g...ip-assessment-thresholds-and-consultation.pdf

It's revea1ing to read page 18 of the above document to see how they construct a 'CFS' sufferer (2 points awarded for care, 0 for mobi1ity) with an MS sufferer (14 points awarded for care, 15 for mobi1ity).

The criteria for being ab1e to comp1ete an activity re1iab1y, repeated1y and without pain and fatigue was on1y inserted into the 1egis1ation after the origina1 PIP criteria were pub1ished, and was a resu1t of a 1ot of campaigning by the chronic i11ness community.

https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/...ion/personal-independence-payment-regulations