Jonathan Howard MD and Science-Based Medicine

[rvallee]

Dr Howard is a US psychiatrist who has been very vocal in pushing back against the many mistakes made during the pandemic, especially the herd immunity strategy. He wrote "We want them infected" a few years ago, mainly to preserve a record of how it happened and mostly using the own words of the proponents of the mass infection strategy, especially the Great Barrington Declaration quacks who ended up pretty much running the US federal health care system.

He is quite busy and probably doesn't have too much time to dedicate to Long Covid, but most of what he wrote about it is coherent and factual. I don't know how much value there would be in reaching out to him, but it's worth being aware of what he says and posts, and he could be an ally down the line.

He writes a lot under the Science-based medicine blog and one of the contributors has recently posted about DecodeME (edit: actually there was a mixup about which study this was, as comments point out below). Could be better on some points, but what I've seen of Howard is someone who isn't stuck on affirming he is right and wants to learn. He is very critical of many of the same issues that overlap with us, including how damaging it is to the credibility of science. For sure many of his loud critics are exactly the kind of vocal critics one should have. I don't think he'd be impressed with the PACE gang and the rest.

A New Test for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

The headline reads, "Breakthrough blood test finally confirms Chronic Fatigue Syndrome." As you might imagine, the story is far more complicated than that. Let's start with some background of chronic

sciencebasedmedicine.org

 

[Mij]

I follow him on X and he really went after debunking V Prasad.

 

[Utsikt]

@rvallee The page you link to seems to have gotten something very wrong.

The headline they link to is about the EpiSwitch study, not DecodeME. The page about EpiSwitch links to DecodeME so I can see where the confusion stems from, but how you don’t notice it’s the wrong study when critiquing it is beyond me.

 

[Andy]

@rvallee The page you link to seems to have gotten something very wrong.

The headline they link to is about the EpiSwitch study, not DecodeME. The page about EpiSwitch links to DecodeME so I can see where the confusion stems from, but how you don’t notice it’s the wrong study when critiquing it is beyond me.

Yes, it's a confused article. Chris Ponting, on behalf of the DecodeME management team, has reached out to the author to try to help clarify the confusion they seem to have, so hopefully the article will be corrected.

 

[rvallee]

@rvallee The page you link to seems to have gotten something very wrong.

The headline they link to is about the EpiSwitch study, not DecodeME. The page about EpiSwitch links to DecodeME so I can see where the confusion stems from, but how you don’t notice it’s the wrong study when critiquing it is beyond me.

Oh I only had glanced at it and didn't notice that. Thanks @Andy, I think he'll listen and fix this.

 

[Verity]

This is a weird and mixed up blog post.

There are some odd statements in there beyond the obvious main issue:

“Sometime we see this following a severe infection, especially encephalitis (brain infection).”

Eh? Especially encephalitis? That’s the first I’ve heard of that.

“The symptoms are also what we call nonspecific, meaning that they can occur with a host of different conditions.”

PEM is pretty recognizable IMO and does not occur with other conditions as far as we know. He doesn’t mention it at all as far as I can tell. Can’t figure out how you could do background reading on ME for a blog post and not encounter PEM.

“Patients with CFS often have depression and/or anxiety. This creates a diagnostic dilemma – are the physical symptoms caused by severe depression, or is the depression secondary to chronic debilitating symptoms?”

This is not a serious dilemma for anyone actually familiar with ME. It just doesn’t look that much like depression or anxiety. Who ever heard of depression dramatically worsened by exercise?

(Edited for formatting)