Nick Brown looks at study on sexual harassment and 'CFS'

You meant childhood abuse in the title, not childhood harrassement, right?

 

I can't cognitively read the webpage but since sexual harassment and abuse are unfortunately common in our society many CFS patients will have this in their past.
And if you cherry pick something carefully enough you can build houses of cards. PACE was built on nonsense and believing discredited psychological nonsense then going out and proving it based on cherry picking is a form of bias.

Despite being disproved there are still many who think stress still has a role in ulcers and heart disease because they are starting from a discredited lie and building on it. Any piece that is unexplained is still blamed on stress not because they worked to it from evidence but they still refuse to let the fallacy die. An example many people have Helicobacter pylori but not all go on to get ulcers. So some have claimed its because stress caused the bacteria to create an ulcer. Gotta stick to what we know no matter how stretched it has to be made.

 

This feeds into the ACE agenda that is percolating down into school/ social work/ police.
The Bath safeguarding seminar will no doubt build on this too.
Cue CBT sessions trawling for past memories and creating potential for future PTSD

 

A profoundly worrying article, I couldn't face reading it all the way through at present, will have to brace myself to face it.

However I can unambiguously say I have never experienced sexual abuse or sexual harrasment, indeed I have no recollection of any childhood traumas beyond life's normal up and downs. Perhaps all the GPs, consultants and researchers I have seen over the last twenty five years have got it wrong and I don't really have ME at all.

 

On a more serious note it is absolutely shocking the number of NHS specialist ME/CFS Services that host 'therapists' fixated on 'conversion' theories of ME that pressurise people with ME to relive as many historic traumas and stressors as possible. Presumably they do not record incidences of PEM or crashes associated with their intervention, though they might even argue such would be evidence that their approach was working.

 

When your a hammer everything is a nail

 

One should not be too surprised. I have recently been looking into some of the history. Early Wessely, David, Pelosi theories show influence by Pilowsky. He was taught by Stengel who was taught in Vienna and translated Freud, but was also a psychoanalyst. Stengel was taught by Paul Schilder who was a pupil of Freud.

I know this is rather tenuous, but is worth bearing in mind.

It is rather like the piano recitals given by X, who was taught by Y, who was taught by Z, until you get back to Liszt, who was taught by Czerny, who learned at the knee of Beethoven and before you know it you're listening to Beethoven. Or so the theory goes.

 

Great. Now I'm reading an 'excellent' blog post on beta coefficients. I hate stats. Even when I think I've got myself to understand something, two days later and I've forgotten it all anyway.

Thanks to Brown for looking into this. It's amazing how little studies like this can end up being influential when they fit into a dominant narrative.

 

I think this could be one of those tabs I keep open for a long time, on the assumption I'll one day take the time to really understand all the details.

 

The study says:

Well, if the sexual harassment involved kissing, this is a means to transmit respiratory viruses, and nearly all the viruses linked to ME/CFS are respiratory viruses (can be transmitted via the respiratory route).

 

There is a difference between cheek kissing (a common way of greeting in some European countries, though not so much in the Anglosphere) or kissing a child on the forehead say, and a deep sexual tongue kiss (a French kiss as it is called in English), which involves saliva exchange.

 

One of the points of the blog was that is was only sexual harassment, not sexual abuse:

 

Well that would tend to rule out my viral infection through kissing theory.

I would like to understand what they mean by sexual harassment, defined in the full paper as "being submitted to sexual acts without physical contact".

The study used the sexual harassment subscale of the Traumatic Experiences Checklist (TEC) to measure sexual harassment.

 

Actually, they do describe what they mean by sexual harassment in the paper: