Michael Sharpe: Mind, Medicine and Morals: A Tale of Two Illnesses (2019) BMJ blog - and published responses

EzzieD said:
(My bold.) Funny that. Last year on Twitter he was proclaiming that ME and CFS are two different conditions and that PACE only studied CFS and wasn't about ME. Previously, he had always stated that they are alternate names for one condition. When a few Twitterers supplied him with documentary evidence of his having previously said they are the same, he blocked those members. Now he's back to saying ME and CFS are the same thing again. Does he just change it to suit the intended audience of the moment?
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That's the thing with liars: unless there are consequences to lying, they just keep on lying and lying. When others are party to the lies, by publishing them or repeating them, then they become attached to those lies as acknowledging them would now impact them personally.

Sharpe still repeats the lie that the only opposition is from butthurt patients and nobody else, and on petty grounds rather than the garbage quality of his research. This is an easy disprovable lie, yet no one who publishes his drivel is bothered to check, or even do something about it when repeatedly slapped in the face with it.

It's all politics. Once you've "otherized" a population, certified that they are not deserving of normal rights and protections (and goodwill, while we're at it), then anything goes, even ethics and morality. People will keep on dying and millions will continue to suffer needlessly because of Sharpe and his colleagues' work and nobody cares who isn't affected or already knows about the facts. Because the lies have become reality and reality has become one with the lies.
 
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Trish said:
Claims biopsychosocial as a 'new approach' to illness and requires a change in medical and societal thinking so patients can access the 'benefits'.
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It's nearly a century old. What time scale are they using? Geological? Phrenology was contemporary to the early days of the psychosocial model. Just because they prepended the bio part as a rebranding exercise does not change that it's a purely psychosomatic model built entirely on the same muddled logical fallacies as in its early days.

What else do they consider a new approach? Electricity? The steam engine? The germ theory of disease? Aqueducts?!
 
strategist said:
He is right in that patients with invisible illnesses are treated as second or third class citizens.

The irony is that he himself is such a big part of the problem: if you insist that unblinded studies are good enough evidence and switch outcomes, then you're effectively saying that ME/CFS patients do not deserve reliable science, and that is an instance of patients being treated like second or third class citizens.

The real purpose of this article is just to try and cover up the fact that his science is rubbish and that the critics are right.
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The last thing I tweeted to Wessely before he blocked me is that him and his school of thought are responsible for fully half of the suffering that we experience.

I am being generous with this, it's way more than half. But it is at least fully half. Over time it gets closer and closer to all of it, as properly funded research would have likely already have made a significant impact. They created and perpetuate enormous suffering and are not bothered with correcting it, even fight against their victims when we beg for mercy. In my book that makes them monsters and I think they will be understood as such with time.

So on the matter of morals, this is the immoral ones calling their victims bad for resisting the nightmare they created. What truly horrible people.
 
Can we escape the trap set by the paradox of illness-without-disease? Our second-order analysis suggests that we acknowledge that all illnesses are real and arise from a mixture of biological, psychological and social factors.23 This new approach assumes that the reality of illness has a complex and indeterminate character, and that the presence of disease does not indicate a more fundamental (or more ‘real’) reality. The focus of medicine on disease is then seen as merely a pragmatic way of simplifying the complexity of illness for the purposes of intervention, valuable where such a simplification is possible and relevant, but also potentially unhelpful or even damaging where it is not. This new approach would therefore fundamentally unsettle the privilege of disease as the arbiter of the validity of illness, and as the model of explanation par excellence.
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I think this is the key paragraph which basically says it should be enough to treat symptoms and that symptoms may be caused by some undetermined relationship between biology, psychology and social factors but they provide no evidence that these factors interact in a way that relates to symptoms. We should remember when reading this that Sharpe claims CBT/GET cure ME.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
I don't even think that a humanity journal would accept this piece. It only gets into BMJ humanities because the editor knows nothing about either medicine or humanities.
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Or maybe because the editor knows the authors?

I find it hard to believe someone could read it and think it was worth reading. It doesn't even seem to have a coherent consistent view and rambles all over the place but fails to define the basic concepts they talk about let alone relationships.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
We propose that this is not through a failure of goodwill on anybody’s part

That seems a bit of a turnaround for someone who has been accusing patients of failure of goodwill and in the process showing the failure of their own goodwill.
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I absolutely call it a failure of goodwill. I think many others would do as well. He is just saying things he wants to be true, not things that actually are true. He also knows very well that many have blamed the failure of goodwill. As usual, Sharpe rejects reality and substitutes his own.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
We propose that this is not through a failure of goodwill on anybody’s part

That seems a bit of a turnaround for someone who has been accusing patients of failure of goodwill and in the process showing the failure of their own goodwill.
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I think he is trying to claim he has acted with good intent and thus shouldn't be blamed for the obvious flaws in his research.
 
The BMJs justification for this piece of diatribe is that they don't shy away from debate. Are they therefore offering up the right of reply to an opponent of Sharpe et al in the form of a full article response?

How about Carolyn Wilshire and Jonathan Edwards?

Or is the debate just going to be about censoring comments from patients?
 
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large donner said:
The BMJs justification for this piece of diatribe is that they don't shy away from debate. Are they therefore offering up the right of reply to an opponent of Sharpe et al in the form of a full article response?

How about Carolyn Wilshire and Jonathan Edwards?

Or is the debate just going to be about censoring comments from patients?
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Comments on the original post were all censored. No commentary was published along.

This was no debate, it was once more the irresponsible and uncritical airing of personal grievances by a delusional immoral man detached from reality and showing reckless disregard for the millions of lives he harmed.

This qualifies more as bullying than as a legitimate debate.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
We propose that this is not through a failure of goodwill on anybody’s part
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This sounds to me like a desperate plea.

Here is the real story, Prof Sharpe: There is now no honourable way out of this left for you to take. The last chance you had for that was the publication of the PACE long-term follow-up paper. But instead you chose to go down with that ship.

The only acceptable path from here is for you and your like-minded colleagues to immediately resign from all positions of authority, and give full and frank cooperation to any formal investigations into the farce, and accept the fate you chose for yourselves.

And I think you know all that.
 
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I didn't expect them to publish commentaries at the same time as publishing this paper. I'd assumed that they'd put submitted commentaries through some sort of review process which would take sometime.
 
https://bmj.altmetric.com/details/62366783/twitter

So far, Altmetric has seen 1 Reddit thread.

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Demographic breakdown
Type Count As %

Members of the public 68 85%
Scientists 4 5%
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals) 4 5%
Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors) 4 5%


Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
United Kingdom 21 26%
United States 5 6%
Australia 4 5%
Germany 3 4%
Ireland 3 4%
Norway 2 3%
Belgium 1 1%
Sweden 1 1%
Netherlands 1 1%
 
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