Mediation analysis re: cognitive behavioural therapy in Q fever fatigue syndrome, 2019, Knoop et al

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022399919305410

 

This is so damn pathetic. How are people not embarrassed enough to bury this putrefied corpse and let it rot there where it belongs? Decades of doing the exact same 2 pieces of research with small variations, loads and loads of speculation and poor attempts at justifying that it's not the treatment that failed the patients it's the patients that failed the treatment. In the end all it will do is associate their precious CBT with so much quackery it will be entirely discredited because of the overabundance of nonsense surrounding it all.

Such a level of incompetence is almost exaggerated, it belongs in satirical accounts. There are many alternative medicine practitioners out there who wouldn't even dare be this ridiculous, have too much self-respect for it and understand the limits of their practice.

Knoop is a lost cause, whatever, quacks are a dime a dozen, but continuing to sanction his work and allowing him to keep a medical license is plain malpractice.

 

What does "mediated" really mean here?

 

And what do they mean by self efficacy?

 

Don't forget, this is psychosomatic research. It appears to be physical but is all in the mind.

 

Ironically in this context it is interchangeable with dis/ability so basically they are pointing at disability caused by illness being the problem but because of a belief system that rejects this they invent a magical explanation instead and run with it and use hand-wavy words that can mean anything.

Exactly like every other pseudoscience out there does. But they can't see that. Even when they deride those pseudosciences doing the same thing they are doing. Dunning-Kruger at work, which clearly has little to do with intelligence but rather wisdom since so many otherwise smart people seem to act exactly as bad as the dumbest out there. The common link is an aggressive inability for self-reflection.

 

Blasphemy.

 

Behaviour of participants answering on one questionnaire is associated with similar bias in behaviour on a related questionnaire! Wow, what a ground breaking finding!

A finger pointing to the sun is not the sun itself.

 

Not sure how well the movie is known outside of the French world but I love this similar (roughly translated) quote from Amélie Poulain:

These people aren't just obsessing over the finger, they built an entire belief system out of the finger being the only thing that exists and the sky being the illusion.

This isn't regular foolishness, it's advanced foolishness.

 

Hopefully we are, in fact, at Rock Bottom.

 

Probably, considering it's been the same tune for 30 years, itself not much different than the stuff in the decades that preceded it. At least being stuck in deep ruts means it's hard to spoil any more places.

Probably the latest innovation was being openly deceitful about it, the whole pretending to acknowledge what patients report but only to build (and then destroy) trust. FND is probably the most blatant about it, saying one thing in public and the complete opposite in "private", except it's not entirely private. But even that dates back to early 20th century so it's more like bringing old tunes as sampled remixes.

I get a mental image of Vanilla ice explaining how the beginning of Ice ice baby is different from Under pressure: "it's dun-dun-dun-tsss, not dun-dunn-dun-tsss, completely different, see music is hard to tell apart* when you're not an expert." (*it's not, we see right through you)

Lately I've seen some discussion about trying different times, like maybe doing the gaslighting early on would be beneficial, but kind of hard after having invented the 6 months of fatigue diagnosis, making early intervention basically ignore what they spent decades to build up. Not that I expect anyone other than us would object to the blatant hypocrisy and inconsistency.