General thread on functional disorders in Denmark

[NelliePledge]

Seems quite likely that what @bobbler suggests applies

Rather like the whole concept of “functional” really meaning something different the responses could well be “damning with faint praise”

 

[bobbler]

I was thinking that myself, that I'd probably answer politely it's provided some useful tools to not provoke anyone.

The patient association was founded in 2017 and claimed then that 300 000 people in Denmark were suffering from functional disorders. If only 97 patients answered this survey in 2025, and only 21% among them had some improvement (which could be due to a lot of reasons), I do hope this is the beginning of the end of Per Fink's ruling.

Yes so less than 21 people

it could be a common sense assumption to think that those who found their experience was good and recovered would have the most interest in giving feedback to ensure it was there if they had future need. And because I assume they would be less 'haunted by bad memories etc.' in relation to a service itself.

So can't assume this is some tip of an iceberg in the way those who had a bad experience might have thought it better to 'say nothing' by not responding.

It is worth noting that it isn't unusual for discharge/release from certain types of places to be entirely dependent on 'performing recovered' and saying the right things. Hence the potential for a very high perceived risk issue for ticking anything other than vs the recovered/improvement/it was wonderful end of the scale.

Interestingly, I also just did a quick google and found this: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1464019/

Conclusions​

Findings suggest that response bias may significantly impact the results of patient satisfaction surveys, leading to overestimation of the level of satisfaction in the patient population overall.

Estimates of satisfaction may be most inflated for providers with the least satisfied patients, thereby threatening the validity of provider-level comparisons.

 

[Sean]

Damning with faint praise, indeed.

 

[rvallee]

The Patient Association for Functional Disorders (PFFL) shared some less than impressive results today on Facebook from a survey on user experiences from patients at Center for Functional Disorders.

None of the 97 respondents say they have recovered, but PFFL says that's no surprise. PFFL emphasise that most of the respondents say they have received some useful tools. Respondents also say that they can't measure effects when it comes to symptoms, but they have gotten increased insight and quality of life.

A full report is expected to be published soon.

Those are some comically blatant turd-polishing questions. About as expected, I doubt the 'report' will be any less overtly generous, but let's give them the opportunity to not be over-the-top biased.

They were saying boo-urns, they were just saying boo-urns!

 

[Hutan]

@bobbler brought this to my attention:

Good piece by professor Peter Le Cour with also an update about Karina Hansen.
Google translated
Danish newspaper “Politiken”, 4 May 2026.
Feature article by Peter la Cour, Specialist in health psychology, professor

It will be a major and important task for the future Minister of Health to develop a worthy and professionally updated guideline for the disease ME, chronic fatigue syndrome. Unfortunately, he should not count on much assistance from the Danish Health Authority.

https://politiken.dk/.../Behandling-af-ME-patienter-kan...

In my opinion, these stories are stories of medical abuse against very weak patients and their powerless relatives.

I don't know what else to call it. Such patient stories are and have been the source of countless anxiety attacks and states of anxiety even among mildly affected ME patients and relatives. They are literally afraid of being forced to be hospitalized if they express opinions and experiences about the ME disease and its care and treatment that differ from what their doctor believes and may have read on Sundhed.dk. Trust in the medical system is completely gone – which in these cases also seems well-founded.

The ME case is grotesque and has attracted political attention for many years now, but nothing has happened. In 2019, all parties in the Danish Parliament supported an adoption that declared that ME should be separated from the term functional disorder.

This has not happened, and this testifies to a major contradiction between the Danish Health Authority and the Ministry of Health in this matter. The contradiction was further confirmed last year.

About two and a half years ago, the Minister of Health allocated 1.5 million kroner for an impartial knowledge assessment of the disease, so that new professional guidelines could be drawn up. The knowledge assessment was to deal with the disease ME and not functional disorders.

But here too, the Danish Health Authority changed the premises. The knowledge assessment was to be carried out by external actors (consulting firms), and the results were to be available within a year. For unknown reasons, however, it took the Danish Health Authority six months to even formulate a tender for the knowledge collection, which they also had reformulated so that the central question of what kind of disease it is, a physical or a psychosocial disease, was removed.

The knowledge collection resulted in two severely delayed reports of very poor professional quality, and both deal largely only with functional disorders. The reports have been scathingly criticized professionally.
But it was only after a forced access to the documents that it became clear that the consulting firm Implement, which wrote one of the reports, had directly let the functional doctors write text and edit it in their report, so that what was written was completely in line with the functionalist view. The other report did not describe ME patients at all, but a different group. The Danish Health Authority was later furious about the possibility of access to the documents, but it is quite clear that the consulting firms were very interested in writing something that did not bother the Danish Health Authority. In that case, they would not get the next assignment from there. So much for professional impartiality.

This is probably something that could turn out to be the biggest health policy scandal of this decade. The Danish Health Authority is now using the reports as evidence for doing absolutely nothing.

It will be a big and important task for the future Minister of Health to develop a worthy and professionally updated guideline for the disease ME. In any case, it will not come from the Danish Health Authority, which has worked reluctantly and decidedly against necessary changes in the ME area for years.
Peter la Cour

 

[Hutan]

Sorry, I should have alerted @Grigor in that last post

 

[rvallee]

Trust in the medical system is completely gone – which in these cases also seems well-founded.

But here too, the Danish Health Authority changed the premises. ... But it was only after a forced access to the documents that it became clear that the consulting firm Implement, which wrote one of the reports, had directly let the functional doctors write text and edit it in their report, so that what was written was completely in line with the functionalist view.

No system built on maximalist lies and deceit can be trusted. In fact it's an insane position to trust a system that has made it very clear it does not want or need to be seen as trustworthy, because it has all the power it needs to not bother. And because this is the same system that deals with everything, it explicitly makes it all guilty by association, because it is explicitly associated. This is bad for everyone, it's stunning that no one involved seems to understand this, but they'd rather blame social media for that.