Miscellaneous Research Thread

[Liie]

It is popular in some communities to attribute ME/CFS to "deconditioning", "unhelpful illness beliefs", and various kinds of "stress".

In this piece in Slate Barry Marshall, the researcher who discovered the cause of ulcers, says the following:

A lot of these things that are supposedly caused by stress, you try to track down the reason for that link, and there isn’t one, except the fact that we don’t have any better cause. Everything that’s supposedly caused by stress, I tell people there’s a Nobel Prize there if you find out the real cause.

That seems likely in our case.

Also a reminder to read about ulcers in @ME/CFS Science Blog's excellent blog series about psychosomatic medicine, who apparently already have discovered this quote.

Edit: This quote also seems relevant to us:

Are you saying that there was no basically no empirical evidence to support the stress-and-acid hypothesis?
You can always find stress in someone’s life if you want to. You ask a few questions and eventually it’s, “Yes, I admit, I was worried about something recently.” So they tried to find evidence for stress causing ulcers, and whenever they had an experiment which worked, it would just be blown out of all proportion, and everyone would get so much publicity out of it that you would think, “Ah, at last, it’s proven.” But the data was very bad. And in fact there was plenty of evidence showing that stress didn’t make much difference.