FREE Long Covid and ME/CFS Holistic Healing VIRTUAL SUMMIT July 10-16, 2023

It's free and I'm Dutch, so even though it's shit......

 

I'm puzzled about this as well. I had never heard of it until about two or three months ago, and yet I have seen it mentioned quite a lot of times since then on all sorts of websites, as well as by various doctors, some possible crackpots and quacks, and Google Scholar has about 3.7 million search results for it.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=methylene+blue&btnG=

It has apparently been around for over a century (according to wikipedia), but why haven't I heard of it before and what has made it very popular all of a sudden?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylene_blue

 

It's been used for bartonella from what I know. If it's effective I dunno.

 

hopefully not like 'Soylent Green'

 

If i remember correctly wasn't this one of the hippy drugs of the seventies used to bring people down after a high .

 

I saw this summit promoted on the blog “Health Rising,” which seems to be a favored news source for many patients. Disconcerting, though much of what I’ve seen on that medium constitutes the dissemination of charlatanry, in my estimation.

 

What's even more amazing is that the use of "holistic" here is the exact same as in psychosomatic medicine. Doesn't seem to bother them that they are talking about the exact same thing as people they openly dismiss and view as quacks. The lack of self-awareness and self-reflection is staggering.

 

What used to be considered fraud is now considered natural or holistic medicine.

 

Methylene blue is widely used as an antiparasitic in the aquarium trade. Apparently it blocks nitric oxide synthase in humans, which might raise blood pressure and account for some reported effects. I wouldn't do that to myself, personally.

This all looks very LP like with all the same problems. IMHO PWME are particularly vulnerable to hope farmers due to cognitive dysfunction and high degrees of stress. In fact I would go so far as to say we can be hypersuggestible.

People are gullible even without ME though. Dont get me started on cults like TM, $1000 to learn to levitate from "TM university".

Levitation my arse!

TM try to wheedle their way into the mainstream every generation to find more victims. Lost intellectuals get tied up in sophistry and narcissism all the time and some then graduate to become perpetrators.

 

I will never forget Wessely's answer to someone asking him that about PACE, something to the effect of: "the placebo is one of the most powerful interventions we have". Even though by design and definition, it is the least effective treatment that has ever existed, since every approved treatment must do better than nothing/placebo. And of course many fake treatments have passed this "test", showing that it was always a mere issue of actually measuring outcomes. It always struck me as so absurd but also it just explains so much about what these people believe.

But of course that's where the separation between medicine and psychology is critical, because however that may be true in medicine, once you've de-medicalized an issue this doesn't matter anymore. Even though their claims are definitely used medically, psychology standards overruling medical ones out of sheer belief and ideology. I guess it just doesn't matter at this point, there's no oversight for any of it.

Before placebo this was called "white coat effect", or something like that. It was the belief that the mere presence of a doctor was healing, they're just magical beings like that, reassuring and everything. And then things just got way out of hand from there. A very harsh lesson in opportunity cost, what is lost by making a choice. Here the decision to go all in on woo destroyed tens of millions of lives and regressed medicine massively, but criticize any of it and you are right back to the old days of religious doctrines imposing myths and traditions above reality.

 

It's fully consistent with widespread beliefs that our "issues" are basically nocebo, or nothing at all, or whatever, therefore placebo is definitely acceptable. Maximizing it is thus definitely optimal, especially as it can do no direct harm, and indirect harms are irrelevant, too hard to even define. Beliefs are fuzzy, can't really be judged adequately, and those beliefs are unquestionable for now, about equal to genetics and every other foundational theory of medicine.

Unfortunately we are in a "who will police the police?" situation, where hardly any MD would dare criticize this, the risk to career is too high. And since MDs would ultimately decide whether this is fraudulent, well, the police definitely thinks they're doing a great job here.

 

This is really bad.